RES    JUDICAT^ 


IN   UNIFORM  BINDING 


ANDREW    LANG 
Letters  to  Dead  Authors    -    -    -    -     $1  00 

AUGUSTINE    BIRRELL 

Obiter  Dicta— First  Series    -     -     -  100 

Obiter  Dicta  — Second  Series    -     -  I  00 

Res  Judicatae I  00 

W.    E.    HENLEY 

Views  and  Reviews  —  Literature     -       I  00 


IlES    JUDICAT^E 


PAPERS  AND   ESSAYS 


BY 

AUGUSTINE    BIRRELL 

AUTHOR  OF   '  OBITER   DICTA,'   ETC. 


'  It  need  hardly  be  added  that  such  sentences  do  not 
any  more  than  the  records  of  the  superior  courts  conclude 
as  to  matters  which  may  or  may  not  have  been  contro- 
verted.' —  See  BLACKH AM 's  Case  I.  Salkeld  290 


NEW  YORK 
CHARLES    SCRIBNER'S    SONS 


COPYRIGHT,   1892,  BY 
CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS. 


PREFACE 

THE  first  two  essays  in  this  volume 
were  composed  as  lectures,  and  are  now 
printed  for  the  first  time ;  the  others  have 
endured  that  indignity  before.  The  pa- 
pers on  'The  Letters  of  Charles  Lamb' 
and  'Authors  in  Court '  originally  appeared 
in  Macmillaris  Magazine ;  and  the  short 
essays  entitled  '  William  Cowper '  and 
'  George  Borrow '  in  the  Reflector,  a  lively 
sheet  which  owed  its  existence  to  and  de- 
rived its  inspiration  from  the  energy  and 
genius  of  the  late  Mr.  J.  K.  Stephen,  whose 
too  early  death  has  not  only  eclipsed  the 
gaiety  of  many  gatherings,  but  has  robbed 
the  country  of  the  service  of  a  noble  and 
truth-loving  man. 


vi  PREFACE 

The  other  papers  appeared  either  in 
Scribner's  Magazine  or  in  the  columns  of 
the  Speaker  newspaper. 

Although,  by  the  kindness  of  my  pres- 
ent publishers,  I  have  always  been  practi- 
cally a  '  protected  article '  in  the  States,  I 
cannot  help  expressing  my  pleasure  in 
finding  myself  in  the  enjoyment  of  the 
same  modest  rights  as  an  author  in  the 
new  home  of  my  people  as  in  the  old. 

A.  B. 
LINCOLN'S  INN,  LONDON. 


CONTENTS 


I.  SAMUEL   RICHARDSON        ....         I 

II.  EDWARD   GIBBON             ....           39 

III.  WILLIAM   COWPER 84 

IV.  GEORGE    BORROW  .            .           .           .11$ 
V.  CARDINAL   NEWMAN            ....    140 

VI.  MATTHEW    ARNOLD        .           .           .           .         l8l 

VII.     WILLIAM    HAZLITT 224 

VIII.  THE    LETTERS  OF   CHARLES  LAMB           .         232 

IX.  AUTHORS   IN  COURT            ....    253 

X.     NATIONALITY 2/4 

XI.  THE   REFORMATION              ....    284 

XII.    SAINTE-BEUVE 298 

vii 


SAMUEL   RICHARDSON 

A  LECTURE 

IT  is  difficult  to  describe  mankind  either 
in  a  book  or  in  a  breath,  and  none  but  the 
most  determined  of  philosophers  or  the 
most  desperate  of  cynics  have  attempted 
to  do  so,  either  in  one  way  or  the  other. 
Neither  the  philosophers  nor  the  cynics  can 
be  said  to  have  succeeded.  The  descrip- 
tions of  the  former  are  not  recognisable  and 
therefore  as  descriptions  at  all  events,  what- 
ever may  be  their  other  merits,  must  be 
pronounced  failures ;  whilst  those  of  the 
cynics  describe  something  which  bears  to 
ordinary  human  nature  only  the  same  sort 
of  resemblance  that  chemically  polluted 
waters  bear  to  the  stream  as  it  flows  higher 
up  than  the  source  of  contamination,  which 
in  this  case  is  the  cynic  himself. 

But  though  it  is  hard  to  describe  man- 
kind, it  is  easy  to  distinguish  between  peo- 


2  SAMUEL  RICHARDSON 

pie.  You  may  do  this  in  a  great  many  dif- 
ferent ways  :  for  example,  and  to  approach 
my  subject,  there  are  those  who  can  read 
Richardson's  novels,  and  those  who  cannot. 
The  inevitable  third-class  passenger,  no 
doubt,  presents  himself  and  clamours  for  a 
ticket :  I  mean  the  man  or  woman  who  has 
never  tried.  But  even  a  lecturer  should 
have  courage,  and  I  say  boldly  that  I  pro- 
vide no  accommodation  for  that  person  to- 
night. If  he  feels  aggrieved,  let  him  seek 
his  remedy  —  elsewhere. 

Mr.  Samuel  Richardson,  of  Salisbury 
Court,  Fleet  Street,  printer,  was,  if  you  have 
only  an  eye  for  the  outside,  a  humdrum 
person  enough.  Witlings,  writing  about 
him  in  the  magazines,  have  often,  out  of 
consideration  for  their  pretty  little  styles, 
and  in  order  to  avoid  the  too  frequent  rep- 
etition of  his  highly  respectable  if  unro- 
mantic  name,  found  it  convenient  to  dub 
him  the  '  little  printer.' 

He  undoubtedly  was  short  of  stature,  and 
in  later  life,  obese  in  figure,  but  had  he 
stood  seven  feet  high  in  his  stockings,  these 
people  would  never  have  called  him  the  '  big 


SAMUEL  RICHARDSON  3 

printer.'  Richardson  has  always  been  ex- 
posed to  a  strong  under-current  of  ridicule. 
I  have  known  people  to  smile  at  the  men- 
tion of  his  name,  as  if  he  were  a  sort  of  man- 
milliner  —  or,  did  the  thing  exist,  as  some 
day  it  may  do,  a  male  nursery-governess. 
It  is  at  first  difficult  to  account  for  this 
strange  colouring  of  the  bubble  reputation. 
Richardson's  life,  admirable  as  is  Mrs.  Bar- 
bauld's  sketch,  cannot  be  said  to  have  been 
written  —  his  letters,  those  I  mean,  he 
wrote  in  his  own  name,  not  the  nineteen 
volumes  he  made  his  characters  write,  have 
not  been  reprinted  for  more  than  eighty 
years.  He  of  all  men  might  be  suffered  to 
live  only  in  his  works,  and  when  we  turn  to 
those  works,  what  do  we  find  ?  Pamela  and 
Clarissa  are  both  terribly  realistic ;  they  con- 
tain passages  of  horror,  and  are  in  parts  pro- 
foundly pathetic,  whilst  Clarissa  is  desper- 
ately courageous.  Fielding,  with  all  his 
swagger  and  bounce,  gold  lace  and  strong 
language,  has  no  more  of  the  boldness  than 
he  has  of  the  sublimity  of  the  historian  of 
Clarissa  Harlowe.  But  these  qualities  avail 
poor  Richardson  nothing.  The  taint  of 
afternoon  tea  still  clings  to  him.  The  facts 


4  SAMUEL  RICHARDSON 

-  the  harmless,  nay,  I  will  say  the  attrac- 
tive, facts  —  that  he  preferred  the  society  of 
ladies  to  that  of  his  own  sex,  and  liked  to  be 
surrounded  by  these,  surely  not  strange 
creatures,  in  his  gardens  and  grottos,  first 
at  North  End,  Hammersmith,  and  after- 
wards at  Parsons  Green,  are  still  remem- 
bered against  him.  Life  is  indeed  full  of 
pitfalls,  if  estimates  of  a  man's  genius  are  to 
be  formed  by  the  garden-parties  he  gave, 
and  the  tea  he  consumed  a  century  and  a 
quarter  ago.  The  real  truth  I  believe  to 
be  this  :  we  are  annoyed  with  Richardson 
because  he  violates  a  tradition.  The  proper 
place  for  an  eighteenth-century  novelist 
was  either  the  pot  or  the  sponging  house. 
He  ought  to  be  either  disguised  in  liquor 
or  confined  for  debt.  Richardson  was 
never  the  one  or  the  other.  Let  us  see 
how  this  works  :  take  Dr.  Johnson  ;  we  all 
know  how  to  describe  him.  He  is  our  great 
moralist,  the  sturdy,  the  severe,  the  pious, 
the  man  who,  as  Carlyle  puts  it  in  his  strik- 
ing way,  worshipped  at  St.  Clement  Danes 
in  the  era  of  Voltaire,  or,  as  he  again  puts 
it,  was  our  real  primate,  the  true  spiritual 
edifier  and  soul's  teacher  of  all  England  ? 


SAMUEL  RICHARDSON  5 

Well,  here  is  one  of  his  reminiscences  :  '  I 
'remember  writing  to  Richardson  from  a 
'  sponging-house  and  was  so  sure  of  my  de- 
'  liverance  through  his  kindness  and  liberal- 
'ity,  that  before  his  reply  was  brought  I 
'  knew  I  could  afford  to  joke  with  the  ras- 
'  cal  who  had  me  in  custody,  and  did  so  over 
1  a  pint  of  adulterated  wine  for  which  at  that 
'  moment  I  had  no  money  to  pay.' 

Now,  there  we  have  the  true,  warm- 
hearted, literary  tradition  of  the  eighteenth 
century.  It  is  very  amusing,  it  is  full  of 
good  feeling  and  fellowship,  but  the  mo- 
rality of  the  transaction  from  the  great  mor- 
alist's point  of  view  is  surely,  like  his  linen, 
a  trifle  dingy.  The  soul's  teacher  of  all 
England,  laid  by  the  heels  in  a  sponging- 
house,  and  cracking  jokes  with  a  sheriff's 
officer  over  a  pint  of  wine  on  the  chance  of 
another  man  paying  for  it,  is  a  situation 
which  calls  for  explanation.  It  is  not  my 
place  to  give  it.  It  could,  I  think,  easily 
be  given.  Dr.  Johnson  was,  in  my  judg- 
ment, all  Carlyle  declared  him  to  be,  and 
to  have  been  called  upon  to  set  him  free 
was  to  be  proudly  privileged,  and,  after  all, 
why  make  such  a  fuss  about  trifles  ?  The 


6  SAMUEL  RICHARDSON 

debt  and  costs  together  only  amounted  to 
£$  1 8s.,  so  that  the  six  guineas  Richard- 
son promptly  sent  more  than  sufficed  to 
get  our  '  real  primate '  out  of  prison,  and 
to  pay  for  the  pint.  All  I  feel  concerned 
to  say  here  is,  that  the  praise  of  this  anec- 
dote belongs  to  the  little  printer,  and  not 
to  the  great  lexicographer.  The  hero  of 
the  parable  of  the  Good  Samaritan  is  the 
Good  Samaritan  himself,  and  not  the  un- 
fortunate, and  therefore  probably  foolish, 
traveller  who  must  need  fall  amongst 
thieves. 

But  if  you  violate  traditions,  and  disturb 
people's  notions  as  to  what  it  is  becoming 
for  you  to  be,  to  do,  or  to  suffer,  you  have 
to  pay  for  it.  An  eighteenth-century  nov- 
elist who  made  a  fortune  first  by  honest 
labour  and  the  practice  of  frugality,  and 
wrote  his  novels  afterwards  ;  who  was  fond 
of  the  society  of  ladies,  and  a  vegetarian  in 
later  life ;  who  divided  his  time  between 
his  shop  and  his  villa,  and  became  in  due 
course  master  of  a  city  company,  is  not 
what  we  have  a  right  to  expect,  and  makes 
a  figure  which  strongly  contrasts  with  that 
of  Richardson's  great  contemporary,  the 


SAMUEL  RICHARDSON  7 

entirely  manly  Henry  Fielding,  whose  very 
name  rings  in  the  true  tradition ;  whilst  as 
for  his  books,  to  take  up  Tom  Jones  is  like 
re-entering  in  middle  life  your  old  college 
rooms,  where,  so  at  least  Mr.  Lowell  as- 
sures us, 

'  You  feel  o'er  you  stealing 

The    old,    familiar,    warm,    champagny,   brandy-punchy 
feeling.' 

It  may  safely  be  said  of  Richardson  that, 
after  attaining  to  independence,  he  did 
more  good  every  week  of  his  life  —  for  he 
was  a  wise  and  most  charitable  man  — 
than  Fielding  was  ever  able  to  do  through- 
out the  whole  of  his  ;  but  this  cannot  alter 
the  case  or  excuse  a  violated  tradition. 

The  position,  therefore,  of  Richardson 
in  our  literature  is  that  of  a  great  Noncon- 
formist. He  was  not  manufactured  ac- 
cording to  any  established  process.  If  I 
may  employ  a  metaphor  borrowed  from  his 
own  most  honourable  craft,  he  was  set  up 
in  a  new  kind  of  type.  He  was  born  in 
1689  in  a  Derbyshire  village,  the  name  of 
which,  for  some  undiscovered  reason,  he 
would  never  tell.  The  son  of  poor  parents 
—  his  father  was  a  joiner —  he  had  never 


8  SAMUEL  RICHARDSON 

any  but  a  village  school  education,  nor  did 
he  in  later  life  worry  much  about  learning, 
or  seek,  as  so  many  printers  have  done,  to 
acquire  foreign  tongues.  At  fourteen  years 
of  age  he  was  bound  apprentice  to  a  printer 
in  Aldersgate  Street,  and  for  seven  years 
toiled  after  a  fashion  which  would  certainly 
nowadays  be  forbidden  by  Act  of  Parlia- 
ment, were  there  the  least  likelihood  of 
anybody  either  demanding  or  performing 
drudgery  so  severe.  When  out  of  his  ap- 
prenticeship, he  worked  for  eight  years  as 
a  compositor,  reader,  and  overseer,  and  then, 
marrying  his  late  master's  daughter,  set  up 
for  himself,  and  slowly  but  steadily  grew 
prosperous  and  respected.  His  first  wife 
dying,  he  married  again,  the  daughter  of  a 
bookseller  of  Bath.  At  the  age  of  fifty  he 
published  his  first  novel,  Pamela.  John 
Bunyan's  life  was  not  more  unlike  an  Arch- 
bishop of  Canterbury's  than  was  Richard- 
son's unlike  the  life  of  an  ordinary  English 
novelist  of  his  period. 

This  simile  to  Nonconformity  also  holds 
good  a  little  when  we  seek  to  ascertain  the 
ambit  of  Richardson's  popularity.  To  do 
this  we  must  take  wide  views.  We  must 


SAMUEL  RICHARDSON  9 

not  confine  our  attention  to  what  may  be 
called  the  high  and  dry  school  of  literary 
orthodoxy.  There,  no  doubt,  Richardson 
has  his  admirers,  just  as  Spurgeon's  ser- 
mons have  been  seen  peeping  out  from 
under  a  heap  of  archidiaconal,  and  even 
episcopal  Charges,  although  the  seat  of 
Spurgeon's  popularity  is  not  in  bishops' 
palaces,  but  in  shop  parlours.  I  do  not 
mean  by  this  that  Richardson  is  now  a 
popular  novelist,  for  the  fact,  I  suppose,  is 
otherwise ;  but  I  mean  that  to  take  the 
measure  of  his  popularity,  you  must  look 
over  the  wide  world  and  not  merely  at  the 
clans  and  the  cliques,  the  noble  army  of 
writers,  and  the  ever  lessening  body  of 
readers  who  together  constitute  what  are 
called  literary  circles.  Of  Richardson's 
great  fame  on  the  Continent,  it  will  be 
time  enough  to  speak  in  a  few  minutes ; 
for  the  moment  I  will  stop  at  home.  Mr. 
Leslie  Stephen,  who  has  been  called  to  be 
editor  of  our  first  really  great  Dictionary 
of  National  Biography,  and  has  in  that 
capacity  to  sit  like  a  coroner's  jury  upon 
every  dead  author,  and  to  decide  whether 
his  exploits  are  to  be  squeezed  into  one 


10  SAMUEL  RICHARDSON 

miserable  paragraph,  or  may  be  allowed 
proudly  to  expand  over  a  page — he,  I  say, 
pronounces  Pamela  to  be  neither  moral 
nor  amusing.  Poor  Pamela,  who  through 
two  mortal  volumes  thinks  of  nothing  but 
her  virtue,  and  how  to  get  married  accord- 
ing to  law  !  to  be  thus  dismissed  by  her 
most  recent,  most  distinguished  editor ! 
But,  I  repeat,  we  must  take  wide  views. 
We  must  not  be  content  with  the  verdict 
of  the  university ;  we  must  seek  that  of 
the  kitchen  :  nor  is  the  distance  ever  great 
between  these  institutions.  Two  months 
ago  a  cook  in  a  family  of  my  acquaintance, 
one  Saturday  evening,  when  like  old  Cas- 
par 'her  work  was  done,'  suddenly  be- 
thought herself  of  Pamela,  a  book  she 
had  not  read  since  girlhood.  Rest  was 
impossible — get  it  forthwith  she  must. 
The  housemaid  proffered  her  The  Heir  of 
Redclyffe,  and  the  kitchen-maid,  a  some- 
what oppressed  damsel,  timidly  produced 
Gates  Ajar.  The  cook  was  not  to  be 
trifled  with  after  any  such  feeble  fashion. 
The  spell  of  Pamela  was  upon  her,  and 
out  she  sallied,  arrayed  in  her  majesty,  to 
gratify  her  soul's  desire.  Had  she  been  a 


SAMUEL  RICHARDSON  II 

victim  of  what  is  called  'Higher  Education 
of  Women,'  and  therefore  in  the  habit  of 
frequenting  orthodox  bookshops,  she  would 
doubtless  have  found  the  quest  at  so  late 
an  hour  as  hopeless  as  that  of  the  Holy 
Grail ;  but  she  was  not  that  sort  of  per- 
son, and  the  shop  she  had  in  her  mind, 
and  whither  she  straightway  bent  her 
steps,  was  a  small  stationer's  where  are 
vended  Family  Heralds  and  Ballads  and 
Pamelas  ;  for  the  latter,  in  cheap  sixpenny 
guise  —  and  I  hope  complete,  but  for  this 
I  cannot  vouch  —  is  a  book  which  is  con- 
stantly reprinted  for  sale  amongst  the 
poor.  The  cook,  having  secured  her  prize, 
returned  to  her  home  in  triumph,  where  a 
dinner  worthy  of  the  name  was  not  to  be 
had  until  Pamela's  virtue  was  rewarded, 
which,  as  you  doubtless  remember,  it  only ' 
was  when  her  master  brings  her  a  license 
and  presses  for  a  day.  She  desires  it  may 
be  on  a  Thursday,  and  gives  her  reasons. 
He  rallies  her  agreeably  on  that  head. 
The  Thursday  following  is  fixed  upon. 
She  reflects  seriously  on  the  near  prospect 
of  her  important  change  of  condition,  and 
is  diffident  of  her  own  worthiness,  and 


12  SAMUEL  RICHARDSON' 

prays  for  humility  that  her  new  condition 
may  not  be  a  snare  to  her,  and  makes  up 
her  mind  how  to  behave  herself  to  the  ser- 
vants, she  herself  having  been  one. 

There  are  well-authenticated  instances  of 
the  extraordinary  power  Pamela  possesses 
of  affecting  those  who  are  not  much  in  the 
habit  of  reading.  There  is  a  story  of  its 
being  read  aloud  by  a  blacksmith  round  his 
anvil  night  after  night,  to  a  band  of  eager 
rustics,  all  dreadfully  anxious  good  Mr. 
Richardson  would  only  move  on  a  little 
faster,  and  yet  unwilling  to  miss  a  single 
one  of  poor  Pamela's  misadventures ;  and 
of  their  greeting  by  hearty  rounds  of  British 
cheers,  the  happy  issue  out  of  her  afflictions 
that  awaits  her,  namely,  her  marriage  with 
the  cause  of  every  one  of  them. 

There  are  living  writers  who  have  writ- 
ten some  admirable  novels,  and  I  have 
known  people  to  be  glad  when  they  were 
finished,  but  never  to  the  pitch  of  three 
times  three. 

I  am  not,  of  course,  recommending  any- 
one to  read  Pamela  ;  to  do  so  would  be  an 
impertinence.  You  have  all  done  so,  or 
tried  to  do  so.  '  I  do  not  remember,'  says 


SAMUEL  RICHARDSON  13 

'  Charles  Lamb,  '  a  more  whimsical  surprise 
'  than  having  been  once  detected  by  a  famil- 
'  iar  damsel,  reclining  at  my  ease  upon  the 
'grass  on  Primrose  Hill,  reading  Pamela. 
1  There  was  nothing  in  the  book  to  make  a 
'  man  seriously  ashamed  at  the  exposure ; 
'but  as  she  seated  herself  down  by  me,  and 
'  seemed  determined  to  read  in  company,  I 
'could  have  wished  it  had  been — any  other 
'  book.  We  read  on  very  socially  for  a  few 
'  pages ;  and  not  finding  the  author  much 
'to  her  taste,  she  got  up  and  went  away. 
'  Gentle  casuist,  I  leave  it  to  thee  to  con- 
'jecture  whether  the  blush  (for  there  was 
'  one  between  us)  was  the  property  of  the 
'  nymph  or  the  swain  in  the  dilemma.  From 
'  me  you  shall  never  learn  the  secret.'1 

Miss  Pamela  Andrews  was,  to  tell  the 
truth,  a  vulgar  young  person.  There  is 
nothing  heroic  or  romantic  about  her;  she 
has  not  a  touch  or  a  trace  of  the  moral 
sublimity  of  Jeannie  Deans,  who  though  of 
the  same  rank  of  life,  belonged  to  another 
country  and  had  had  an  entirely  different 
up-bringing.  What  a  reply  was  that  of 
Jeannie's  to  the  Rev.  Mr.  Staunton,  George 

1  Last  Essays  of  Elia,  52. 


14  SAMUEL  RICHARDSON 

Robertson's  father,  when  he,  entirely  mis- 
apprehending the  purport  of  her  famous 
journey,  lets  her  perceive  that  he  fancies 
she  is  plotting  for  her  own  marriage  with 
his  son.  Says  the  father  to  the  son  :  *  Per- 
'haps  you  intend  to  fill  up  the  cup  of  dis- 
'  obedience  and  profligacy  by  forming  a  low 
'  and  disgraceful  marriage  ;  but  let  me  bid 
'  you  beware.'  '  If  you  were  feared  for  sic 
'a  thing  happening  with  me,  sir,'  said 
Jeannie,  '  I  can  only  say  that  not  for  all 
'the  land  that  lies  between  the  twa  ends  of 
'the  rainbow,  wad  I  be  the  woman  that 
'  should  wed  your  son.'  '  There  is  something 
'very  singular  in  all  this,'  said  the  elder 
Staunton ;  and  so  Pamela  would  have 
thought.  She,  honest  girl  that  she  was, 
was  always  ready  to  marry  anybody's  son, 
only  she  must  have  the  marriage  lines  to 
keep  in  her  desk  and  show  to  her  dear 
parents. 

The  book's  origin  ought  not  to  be  over- 
looked. Some  London  booksellers,  know- 
ing Mr.  Richardson  to  be  a  grave  man  of 
decorous  life,  and  with  a  talent  for  moralis- 
ing, desired  him  to  write  a  series  of  familiar 
letter  on  the  behaviour  of  young  women 


SAMUEL  RICHARDSON  15 

going  out  to  service  for  the  first  time  ;  they 
never  intended  a  novel :  they  wanted  a 
manual  of  conduct  —  that  conduct  which, 
according  to  a  precise  Arithmetician  is 
three-fourths,  or  some  other  fraction,  of 
human  life.  It  was  in  this  spirit  that 
Richardson  sat  down  to  write  Pamela  and 
make  himself  famous.  He  had  a  facile 
pen,  and  the  book,  as  it  grew  under  his 
hand,  outstripped  its  design,  but  never 
lost  sight  of  it.  It  was  intended  for  Pame- 
las, and  is  bourgeois  to  the  very  last  degree. 
The  language  is  simple,  but  its  simplicity 
is  not  the  noble,  soul-stirring  simplicity  of 
Bunyan,  nor  is  it  the  manly  simplicity  of 
Cobbett  or  Hugh  Miller :  it  is  the  ignoble, 
and  at  times  almost  the  odious,  simplicity 
of  a  merely  uncultured  life.  It  abounds  in 
vulgar  phrases  and  vulgar  thoughts ;  still,  it 
reflects  powerfully  the  scenes  it  portrays, 
and  you  feel  as  you  read  a  fine  affinity 
between  the  communicating  medium,  the 
language,  and  the  thing  communicated,  the 
story.  When  people  said,  in  the  flush  of 
their  first  enthusiasm,  as  they  did  say,  that 
there  were  but  two  good  books  in  the  world, 
the  Bible,  and  Pamela,  this  is  what,  perhaps 


1 6  SAMUEL  RICHARDSON 

unconsciously  they  were  thinking  of ;  other- 
wise they  were  talking  nonsense.  Pamela 
spoke  a  language  still  understood  of  many, 
and  if  she  was  not  romantic  or  high-flown, 
there  are  others  like  her.  We  are  always 
well  pleased,  and  it  is  perhaps  lucky  for  the 
majority  of  novelists  that  it  should  be  so, 
to  read  about  people  who  do  not  in  the 
least  resemble  us ;  still,  anyone  who  de- 
scribes us  as  we  are,  '  strikes  the  electric 
chain  wherewith  we  are  darkly  bound,'  and 
makes  humanity  quiver  right  down  the 
centuries.  Pamela  was  a  vulgar  little 
thing,  and  saucy  withal :  her  notions  of 
honour  and  dishonour  were  neither  lofty  nor 
profound ;  but  she  had  them  and  stuck  to 
them  in  perilous  paths  along  which  the 
defenceless  of  hef  sex  are  too  often  called 
to  tread  ;  and  when  finally  her  virtue  is  re- 
warded, and  she  is  driven  off  in  a  chariot 
drawn  by  the  four  long-tailed  mares  upon 
whom  she  had  been  cruelly  twitted  for  set- 
ting her  affections,  I  for  one  am  quite  pre- 
pared to  join  with  the  rustics  round  the 
blacksmith's  anvil  in  loud  cheers  for  Pamela. 
Ten  years  after  Pamela  came  Clarissa. 
It  is  not  too  much  to  say  that  not  only 


SAMUEL  RICHARDSON  \J 

Great  Britain  and  Ireland,  (the  latter  coun- 
try not  yet  deprived  of  her  liberties  by  the 
Act  of  Union,  and  therefore  in  a  position 
to  pirate  popular  authors,  after  the  agreea- 
ble fashion  of  our  American  cousins,1)  but 
also  France,  Germany,  and  Holland,  simply 
gulped  Clarissa  down ;  and  she  was  in  seven 
volumes.  It  was  a  kind  of  gospel,  some- 
thing good  and  something  new.  Its  author 
was  a  stout  tradesman  of  sixty,  but  he  was 
not  in  the  very  least  degree  what  is  now 
called  —  perhaps  to  the  point  of  nausea  — 
a  Philistine.  By  a  Philistine  I  suppose  we 
must  understand  someone  who  lives  and 
moves  and  has  his  being  in  the  realm  of  ordi- 
nary stock  conventional  ideas  —  a  man  who 
is  as  blind  to  the  future  as  he  is  deaf  to  the 
past.  For  example,  that  Dr.  Drummond, 
Archbishop  of  York,  who  just  about  this 
very  time  told  the  Rev.  Mr..  Conyers,  one 
of  his  clergy,  '  that  he  would  be  better  em- 
'  ployed  preaching  the  morality  of  Socrates 
'  than  canting  about  the  New  Birth,'  was  a 
Philistine  —  I  doubt  not  a  very  amiable  one, 
but,  being  a  Philistine,  he  had  no  chance 
of  recognising  what  this  nascent  methodism 

1  Since  abandoned,  Laus  Deo  ! 


1 8  SAMUEL  RICHARDSON 

was,  and  as  for  dreaming  what  it  might 
become — had  he  been  capable  of  this  — 
he  would  not  have  been  a  Philistine  or, 
probably,  Archbishop  of  York  ! 

Richardson  on  the  other  hand  had  his 
quiver  full  of  new  ideas ;  he  had  his  face 
to  the  east ;  he  was  no  mere  inheritor,  he 
was  a  progenitor.  He  is,  in  short,  as  has 
been  often  said,  our  Rousseau ;  his  charac- 
ters were  not  stock  characters.  Think  of 
Fielding's  characters,  his  Tom  Joneses  and 
Booths,  his  Amelias  and  Sophias.  They  are 
stage  properties  as  old  as  the  Plantagenets. 
They  are  quite  unidea'd,  if  I  may  use  a  word 
which,  as  applied  to  girls,  has  the  authority 
of  Dr.  Johnson.  Fielding's  men  are  either 
good  fellows  with  large  appetites,  which 
they  gratify  openly,  or  sneaks  with  equally 
large  appetites,  which  they  gratify  on  the 
sly ;  whilst  the  characters  of  his  women  are 
made  to  hinge  solely  upon  their  willingness 
or  unwillingness  to  turn  a  blind  eye.  If 
they  are  ready  to  do  this,  they  are  angels  ; 
Sophia  comes  upon  the  stage  in  a  chapter 
headed  '  A  short  hint  of  what  we  can  do  in 
'the  sublime,  and  a  description  of  Miss 
'  Sophia  Western.'  Poor  neglected  Amelia, 


SAMUEL  RICHARDSON  19 

whenever  she  is  forgiving  her  husband,  is 
described  as  '  all  one  blaze  of  beauty ; '  but 
if  they  are  not  willing  to  play  this  rdle, 
why  then  they  are  unsexed  and  held  up  to 
the  ridicule  and  reprobation  of  all  good  fel- 
lows and  pretty  women.  This  sort  of  thing 
was  abhorrent  to  the  soul  of  the  little 
printer ;  he  hated  Fielding's  boisterous 
drunkards  with  an  entire  hatred.  I  be- 
lieve he  would  have  hated  them  almost  as 
much  if  Fielding  had  not  been  a  rival  of 
his  fame.  He  said  he  was  not  able  to  read 
any  more  than  the  first  volume  of  Amelia, 
and  as  for  Tom  Jones,  in  the  year  1750,  he 
was  audacious  enough  to  say  that  its  run 
was  over.  Regarded  merely  as  writers, 
there  can,  I  suppose,  be  no  real  rivalry 
between  Fielding  and  Richardson.  The 
superiority  of  Fielding  is  apparent  on  every 
page.  Wit,  good-humour,  a  superb  lusty 
style  which  carries  you  along  like  a  pair  of 
horses  over  a  level  moorland  road,  incidents, 
adventures,  inns,  and  all  the  glory  of  mo- 
tion, high  spirits,  huge  appetites,  pretty 
women  —  what  a  catalogue  it  makes  of 
things  no  doubt  smacking  of  this  world 
and  the  kingdom  thereof,  but  none  the  less 


20  SAMUEL  RICHARDSON 

delightful  on  that  account !  No  wonder 
Tom  Jones  is  still  running  ;  where,  I  should 
like  to  know,  is  the  man  bold  enough  to 
stop  him.  But  for  all  this,  Richardson  was 
the  more  remarkable  and  really  interesting 
man  of  the  two  ;  and  for  the  reason  that 
he  was  the  evangel  of  the  new  sentimental- 
ism,  that  word  which  so  puzzled  one  of  his 
most  charming  correspondents  that  she 
wrote  to  ask  him  what  it  meant  —  this  new 
word  sentimental  which  was  just  beginning 
to  be  in  everybody's  mouth.  We  have 
heard  a  good  deal  of  it  since. 

Clarissa  Harlowe  has  a  place  not  merely 
amongst  English  novels,  but  amongst  Eng- 
lish women. 

It  was  a  new  thing  for  a  woman  to  be 
described  as  being  not  only  in  herself  but 
by  herself  commendable  and  altogether 
lovely,  as  triumphing  in  her  own  right  over 
the  crudest  dishonour,  and  rejecting,  with 
a  noble  scorn  new  to  literature,  the  hand 
in  marriage  of  the  villain  who  had  done  her 
wrong.  The  book  opened  the  flood-gates 
of  human  tears.  The  waters  covered  the 
earth.  We  cannot  weep  as  they  used  to 
do  in  'the  brave  days  of  old.' 


SAMUEL  RICHARDSON  21 

Listen  to  the  wife  of  a  Lancashire 
baronet :  '  I  verily  believe  I  have  shed  a 
'pint  of  tears,  my  heart  is  still  bursting 
'though  they  cease  not  to  flow  at  this 
'moment,  nor  will  I  fear  for  some  time. 
'.  .  .  Had  you  seen  me  I  surely  should 
'have  moved  your  pity.  When  alone  in 
'agonies  would  I  lay  down  the  book,  take 
'it  up  again,  walk  about  the  room,  let  fall 
'  a  flood  of  tears,  wipe  my  eyes,  read  again, 
'perhaps  not  three  lines,  throw  away  the 
'  book,  crying  out :  "  Excuse  me,  good  Mr. 
' "  Richardson,  I  cannot  go  on,  it  is  your 
' "  fault,  you  have  done  more  than  I  can 
'  "  bear  ; "  threw  myself  upon  my  couch 
'to  compose;  again  I  read,  again  I  acted 
'  the  same  part,  sometimes  agreeably  inter- 
'  rupted  by  my  dear  man,  who  was  at  that 
'  time  labouring  through  the  sixth  volume 
'  with  a  heart  capable  of  impressions  equal 
'to  my  own  —  tho'  the  effects  shown  in  a 
'more  justifiable  manner  —  which  I  believe 
'  may  be  compared  to  what  Mr.  Belfort  felt 
'when  he  found  the  beauteous  sufferer  in 
'her  prison-room.  Something  rose  in  my 
'  throat,  I  knew  not  what,  which  made  me 
'  guggle  as  it  were  for  speech.' 


22  SAMUEL  RICHARDSON 

Nor  did  the  men  escape ;  a  most  grave 
and  learned  man  writes  : 

'That  Pamela  and  Clarissa  have  again 
*  "obtained  the  honour  of  my  perusal,"  do 
'  you  say,  my  dear  Mr.  Richardson.  I  as- 
'  sure  you  I  think  it  an  honour  to  be  able 
'  to  say  I  have  read,  and  as  long  as  I  have 
'eyes  will  read,  all  your  three  most  excel- 
'  lent  pieces  at  least  once  a  year,  that  I  am 
'  capable  of  doing  it  with  increasing  pleas- 
'  ure  which  is  perpetually  doubled  by  the 
'  reflection,  that  this  good  man,  this  charm- 
'  ing  author,  is  my  friend,  I  have  been  this 
'day  weeping  over  the  seventh  volume  of 
'  Clarissa  as  if  I  had  attended  her  dying 
'bed  and  assisted  at  her  funeral  proces- 
'sion.  Oh  may  my  latter  end  be  like 
'  hers ! ' 

It  is  no  wonder  the  author  of  Clarissa 
had  soon  a  great  correspondence  with  ladies, 
married  and  single,  young  and  old,  virtuous 
and  the  reverse.  Had  he  not  written  seven 
volumes,  all  about  a  girl  ?  had  he  not  made 
her  beautiful,  wise  and  witty  and  learned 
withal  ?  had  he  not  depicted  with  extraor- 
dinary skill  the  character  of  the  fascinating 
—  the  hitherto  resistless  Lovelace,  who, 


SAMUEL  RICHARDSON  23 

though  accomplishing  Clarissa's  ruin  does 
thereby  but  establish  her  triumph  and  con- 
found himself?  It  is  no  doubt  unhappily 
the  case  that  far  too  many  of  Richardson's 
fair  correspondents  lacked  the  splendid 
courage  of  their  master,  and  to  his  infinite 
annoyance  fell  in  love  with  his  arch-scamp, 
and  prayed  his  creator  that  Lovelace  might 
first  be  led  to  see  the  error  of  his  ways, 
and  then  to  the  altar  with  the  divine 
Clarissa.  But  the  heroic  printer  was  ad- 
amant to  their  cries,  and  he  was  right  if 
ever  man  was.  As  well  might  King  Lear 
end  happily  as  Clarissa  Harlowe. 

The  seven  volumes  caused  immense  talk 
and  discussion,  and  it  was  all  Clarissa, 
Clarissa,  Clarissa.  Sophia  Western  was, 
as  we  have  seen,  a  comely  girl  enough,  but 
she  was  as  much  like  Clarissa  as  a  ship  in 
dock  is  like  a  ship  at  sea  and  on  fire. 
What  can  you  find  to  say  of  her  or  to 
her  ? 1  When  you  have  dug  Tom  Jones  in 

1  Richardson  in  a  letter  says  this  of  her,  '  the  weak, 
'the  insipid,  the  runaway,  the  inn- frequenting  Sophia;  ' 
and  calls  her  lover  '  her  illegitimate  Tom.'  But  nobody 
else  need  say  this  of  Sophia,  and  as  for  Tom  he  was  de- 
clared to  be  a  foundling  from  the  first. 


24  SAMUEL  RICHARDSON 

the  ribs,  and  called  him  a  lucky  dog,  and 
wished  her  happy,  you  turn  away  with  a 
yawn ;  but  Clarissa  is  immense.  Do  you 
remember  Thackeray's  account  in  the 
Roundabout  Papers  of  Macaulay's  rhap- 
sody in  the  Athenaeum  Club.  '  I  spoke  to 
'him  once  about  Clarissa.  "  Not  read  Clar- 
' "  issa  ?  "  he  cried  out.  "  If  you  have  once 
'  "  thoroughly  entered  on  Clarissa  and  are 
' "  infected  by  it,  you  can't  leave  off.  When 
' "  I  was  in  India  I  passed  one  hot  season 
'  "  at  the  hills,  and  there  were  the  governor- 
' "  general,  the  secretary  of  government, 
'"the  commander-in-chief  and  their  wives. 
' "  I  had  Clarissa  with  me,  and  as  soon  as 
' "  they  began  to  read  the  whole  station 
' "  was  in  a  passion  of  excitement  about 
' "  Miss  Harlowe  and  her  misfortunes,  and 
' "  her  scoundrelly  Lovelace.  The  gov- 
' "  ernor's  wife  seized  the  book,  and  the 
' "  secretary  waited  for  it,  and  the  chief 
'"justice  could  not  read  it  for  tears."  He 
'  acted  the  whole  scene,  he  paced  up  and 
'down  the  Athenaeum  Library.  I  dare 
'say  he  could  have  spoken  pages  of  the 
'  book,  of  that  book,  and  of  what  countless 
'piles  of  others.' 


SAMUEL  RICHARDSON  2$ 

I  must  be  permitted  to  observe  that  law- 
yers have  been  great  Richardsonians.  The 
Rev.  Mr.  Loftus,  writing  to  our  author 
from  Ireland,  says  :  '  I  will  tell  you  a  story 
'  about  your  sweet  girl  Pamela.  Our  late 
'  lord  chancellor,1  who  was  a  man  more 
'  remarkable  for  the  goodness  of  his  heart 
'than  even  for  the  abilities  of  his  head, 
'  which  were  of  the  most  exalted  kind,  was 
'  so  struck  with  her  history  that  he  sat  up 
'  reading  it  the  whole  night,  although  it 
*  was  then  the  middle  of  term,  and  declared 
'  to  his  family  he  could  not  find  it  in  his 
'  heart  to  quit  his  book,  nor  imagined  it  to 
'  be  so  late  by  many  hours.' 

The  eminent  Sergeant  Hill,  though 
averse  to  literature,  used  to  set  Clarissa's 
will  before  his  pupils,  and  bid  them  deter- 
mine how  many  of  its  uses  and  trusts 
could  be  supported  in  court.  I  am  sorry 
to  have  to  add  that  in  the  learned  ser- 
geant's opinion,  poor  Clarissa,  in  addition 
to  all  her  other  misfortunes,  died  intestate. 

All  this  commotion  and  excitement  and 
Clarissa-worship  meant  that  something  was 
brewing,  and  that  good  Mr.  Richardson, 

1  Jocelyn,  founder  of  the  Roden  peerage. 


26  SAMUEL  RICHARDSON 

with  his  fat,  round  face  flushed  with  the 
fire,  had  his  ladle  in  the  pan  and  was  busy 
stirring  it  about.  What  is  called  the  cor- 
respondence of  Samuel  Richardson,  which 
was  edited  by  that  admirable  woman,  Mrs. 
Barbauld,  and  published  in  six  volumes  in 
1804,  is  mostly  made  up,  not  of  letters 
from,  but  to,  the  author  of  Clarissa.  All 
the  more  effectually  on  that  account  does 
it  let  us  into  the  manufactory  of  his  mind. 
The  letters  a  man  receives  are  perhaps 
more  significant  of  his  real  character  than 
those  he  writes.  People  did  not  write  to 
Mr.  Richardson  about  themselves  or  about 
their  business,  or  about  literature,  unless 
it  were  to  say  they  did  not  like  Tom 
Jones,  or  about  politics,  or  other  sports, 
but  they  wrote  to  him  about  himself  and 
his  ideas,  his  good  woman,  Clarissa,  his 
good  man,  Sir  Charles,  and  the  true  rela- 
tion between  the  sexes.  They  are  im- 
mense fun,  these  letters,  but  they  ought 
also  to  be  taken  seriously ;  Mr.  Richard- 
son took  them  as  seriously  as  he  always 
took  himself.  There  was,  perhaps,  only 
one  subject  Richardson  regarded  as  of 
equal  importance  with  himself,  and  that 


SAMUEL   RICHARDSON  2/ 

was  the  position  of  woman.  This  is  why 
he  hated  Fielding,  the  triumphant,  ortho- 
dox Fielding,  to  whom  man  was  a  rollick- 
ing sinner,  and  woman  a  loving  slave.  He 
pondered  on  this  subject,  until  the  anger 
within  him  imparts  to  his  style  a  virility 
and  piquancy  not  usually  belonging  to  it. 
The  satire  in  the  following  extract  from  a 
letter  he  wrote  to  the  good  lady  who  shed 
a  pint  of  tears  over  Clarissa,  is  pungent : 
'  Man  is  an  animal  that  must  bustle  in  the 
'world,  go  abroad,  converse,  fight  battles, 
'encounter  other  dangers  of  seas,  winds, 
'  and  I  know  not  what,  in  order  to  protect, 
'  provide  for,  maintain  in  ease  and  plenty, 
'women.  Bravery,  anger,  fierceness  are 
'  made  familiar  to  them.  They  buffet  and 
'  are  buffeted  by  the  world  ;  are  impatient 
'  and  uncontrollable  ;  they  talk  of  honour, 
'run  their  heads  against  stone  walls  to 
'make  good  their  pretensions  to  it,  and 
'  often  quarrel  with  one  another  and  fight 
'duels  upon  any  other  silly  thing  that 
'happens  to  raise  their  choler  —  their 
'  shadows  if  you  please ;  while  women  are 
'  meek,  passive,  good  creatures,  who  used 
'  to  stay  at  home,  set  their  maids  at  work, 


28  SAMUEL   RICHARDSON 

'and  formerly  themselves,  get  their  houses 
'in  order  to  receive,  comfort,  oblige,  give 
'joy  to  their  fierce,  fighting,  bustling, 
'active  protectors,  providers,  maintainers, 
'divert  him  with  pretty  pug's  tricks,  tell 
'him  soft  tales  of  love,  and  of  who  and 
'who's  together,  what  has  been  done  in 
'his  absence,  bring  to  him  little  master, 
'  so  like  his  own  dear  papa,  and  little  pretty 
'miss,  a  soft,  sweet,  smiling  soul,  with  her 
'sampler  in  her  hand,  so  like  what  her 
'  meek  mamma  was  at  her  years.' 

You  cannot,  indeed,  lay  hold  of  many 
specific  things  which  Richardson  advo- 
cated. Ignorant  of  the  classics  himself, 
he  was  by  no  means  disposed  to  advocate 
the  teaching  of  them  to  women.  Clarissa, 
indeed,  knew  Latin,  but  Harriet  Byron 
did  not.  The  second  Mrs.  Richardson 
was  just  a  little  bit  too  much  for  her  hus- 
band, and  he  was  consequently  led  to  hold 
what  may  be  called  '  high  doctrine '  as  to 
the  duty  of  wives  obeying  their  husbands. 
Though  never  was  man  less  of  a  revolu- 
tionary than  Richardson,  still  he  was  on 
the  side  of  the  revolution.  He  had  an 
ethical  system  different  from  that  which 


SAMUEL  RICHARDSON  29 

stood  beside  him.  This  did  not  escape 
the  notice  of  a  keen-witted  contemporary, 
the  great  Smollett,  whose  own  Roderick 
Randoms  and  Peregrine  Pickles  are  such 
unmitigated,  high-coloured  ruffians  as  to 
induce  Sir  Walter  Scott  to  call  him  the 
Rubens  of  fiction,  but  who  none  the  less 
had  an  eye  for  the  future  ;  he  in  his  his- 
tory speaks  in  terms  of  high  admiration  of 
the  sublime  code  of  ethics  of  the  author  of 
Clarissa.  Richardson  was  fierce  against 
duelling,  and  also  against  corporal  punish- 
ment. He  had  the  courage  to  deplore 
the  evil  effects  produced  by  the  works  of 
Homer,  '  that  fierce,  fighting  Iliad]  as  he 
called  it.  We  may  be  sure  his  children  were 
never  allowed  to  play  with  tin  soldiers,  at 
least,  not  with  their  father's  consent. 

Having  written  Clarissa  it  became  inev- 
itable that  Richardson  should  proceed  fur- 
ther and  write  Grandison.  In  reading  his 
correspondence  we  hail  Sir  Charles  afar 
off.  Richardson  had  deeply  grieved  to 
see  how  many  of  his  ladies  had  fallen  in 
love  with  the  scoundrelly  Lovelace.  It 
wounded  him  to  the  quick,  for  he  could  not 
but  feel  that  he  was  not  in  the  least  like 


30  SAMUEL  RICHARDSON 

Lovelace  himself.  He  turns  almost  sav- 
agely upon  some  of  his  fair  correspondents 
and  upbraids  them,  telling  them  indeed 
plainly  that  he  feared  they  were  no  better 
than  they  should  be.  They  had  but  one 
answer :  '  Ah,  dear  Mr.  Richardson,  in 
'  Clarissa  you  have  shown  us  the  good 
'woman  we  all  would  be.  Now  show  us 
'the  good  man  we  all  should  love.'  And 
he  set  about  doing  so  seriously,  aye  and 
humbly,  too.  He  writes  with  a  sad  sincer- 
ity a  hundred  years  cannot  hide  : 

'  How  shall  a  man  obscurely  situated, 
'  never  in  his  life  delighting  in  public  en- 
'  tertainments,  nor  in  his  youth  able  to  fre- 
'  quent  them  from  narrowness  of  fortune  ; 
'  one  of  the  most  attentive  of  men  to  the 
'calls  of  business  —  his  situation  for  many 
'years  producing  little  but  prospects  of  a 
'  numerous  family  —  a  business  that  seldom 
'  called  him  abroad  when  he  might  in  the 
'course  of  it  see  and  know  a  little  of  the 
'world,  as  some  employments  give  oppor- 
'tunities  to  do  —  naturally  shy  and  sheep- 
'  ish,  and  wanting  more  encouragement  by 
'smiles  to  draw  him  out  than  anybody 
'thought  it  worth  their  while  to  give  him 


SAMUEL  RICHARDSON  31 

' —  and  blest  (in  this   he  will   say   blest) 
'with  a  mind  that  set  him  above  depend- 

*  ence,  and  making  an  absolute  reliance  on 

*  Providence   and   his   own   endeavours  — 
'how  I  say,  shall  such  a  man  pretend  to 
'describe    and    enter   into    characters   in 
'  upper  life  ? ' 

However,  he  set  about  it,  and  in  1754 
produced  Sir  Charles  Grandison,  or  as  he 
had  originally  intended  to  call  it,  the 
Good  Man,  in  six  octavo  volumes. 

I  am  not  going  to  say  he  entirely  suc- 
ceeded with  his  good  man,  who  I  know 
has  been  called  an  odious  prig.  I  have 
read  Sir  diaries  Grandison  once  —  I  can- 
not promise  ever  to  read  it  again,  and  yet 
who  knows  what  may  happen  ?  Sir  Walter 
Scott,  in  his  delightful,  good-humoured 
fashion,  tells  a  tale  of  a  venerable  lady  of 
his  acquaintance,  who,  when  she  became 
subject  to  drowsy  fits,  chose  to  have  Sir 
Charles  read  to  her  as  she  sat  in  her  elbow 
chair  in  preference  to  any  other  work ; 
because,  said  she,  'should  I  drop  asleep  in 
'  the  course  of  the  reading,  I  am  sure  when 
'  I  awake  I  shall  have  lost  none  of  the  story, 


32  SAMUEL  RICHARDSON 

'  but  shall  find  the  party  where  I  left  them, 
'conversing  in  the  cedar-parlour.' 

After  Sir  Charles,  Richardson  wrote  no 
more.  Indeed,  there  was  nothing  to  write 
about,  unless  he  had  taken  the  advice  of  a 
morose  clerical  friend  who  wrote  to  him  : 
'  I  hope  you  intend  to  give  us  a  bad  woman 
' — expensive,  imperious,  lewd,  and,  at  last, 
'a  drammer.  This  is  a  fruitful  and  neces- 
'sary  subject  which  will  strike  and  enter- 
'  tain  to  a  miracle.'  Mr.  Richardson  replied 
jocosely  that  if  the  Rev.  Mr.  Skelton  would 
only  sketch  the  she-devil  for  him,  he  would 
find  room  for  her  somewhere,  and  the 
subject  dropped.  The  wife  of  the  cele- 
brated German  poet,  Klopstock,  wrote  to 
him  in  her  broken  English  :  '  Having  fin- 

O  O 

'  ished  your  Clarissa  (oh,  the  heavenly 
'book!)  I  would  prayed  you  to  write  the 
'history  of  a  manly  Clarissa,  but  I  had 
'not  courage  enough  at  that  time.  I 
'  should  have  it  no  more  to-day,  as  this  is 
'only  my  first  English  letter ;  but  I  am  now 
'  Klopstock's  wife,  and  then  I  was  only  the 
'  single  young  girl.  You  have  since  written 
'the  manly  Clarissa  without  my  prayer. 
'  Oh,  you  have  done  it  to  the  great  joy  and 


SAMUEL  RICHARDSON  33 

'  thanks  of  all  your  happy  readers  !  Now 
'you  can  write  no  more.  You  must  write 
'  the  history  of  an  Angel.' 

The  poor  lady  died  the  following  year 
under  melancholy  circumstances,  but  her 
prophecy  proved  true.  Richardson  wrote 
no  more.  He  died  in  1761,  seventy-two 
years  of  age.  His  will,  after  directing 
numerous  mourning-rings  to  be  given  to 
certain  friends,  proceeds  as  follows  :  '  Had 
'I  given  rings  to  all  the  ladies  who  have 
'honoured  me  with  their  correspondence, 
'  and  whom  I  sincerely  venerate  for  their 
'amiable  qualities,  it  would  even  in  this 
'  last  solemn  act  appear  like  ostentation.' 

It  now  only  remains  to  say  two  or  three 
words  about  Richardson's  great  popularity 
abroad.  Until  quite  recently,  he  and 
Sterne  may  be  said  to  have  been  the  only 
popular  English  authors  abroad ;  perhaps 
Goldsmith  should  be  added  to  the  party. 
Foreigners  never  felt  any  difficulty  about 
him  or  about  the  tradition  he  violated. 
The  celebrated  author  of  Manon  Lescatit 
translated  Clarissa  into  French,  though  it 
was  subsequently  better  done  by  a  less 
famous  hand.  She  was  also  turned  into 


34  SAMUEL  RICHARDSON 

German  and  Dutch.  Foreigners,  of  course, 
could  not  be  expected  to  appreciate  the 
hopeless  absurdity  of  a  man  who  lived  at 
Parson's  Green  attempting  to  describe  the 
upper  classes.  Horace  Walpole  when  in 
Paris  did  his  best  to  make  this  plain,  but 
he  failed.  Say  what  he  might,  Clarissa  lay 
on  the  toilet  tables  of  the  French  Prin- 
cesses, and  everybody  was  raving  about 
her.  Lady  Mary  Wortley  Montagu  was 
also  very  angry.  '  Richardson,'  says  she, 
writing  to  the  Countess  of  Bute,  'has  no 
'idea  of  the  manners  of  high  life.  Such 
'liberties  as  pass  between  Mr.  Lovelace  and 
'  his  cousins  are  not  to  be  excused  by  the 
'  relation.  I  should  have  been  much  aston- 
'ished  if  Lord  Denbigh  should  have  offered 
'  to  kiss  me  ;  and,  I  dare  swear  Lord  Tren- 
'  tham  never  attempted  such  impertinence 
'  to  you.'  To  the  English  reader  these 
criticisms  of  Lady  Mary's  have  immense 
value  ;  but  the  French  sentimentalist,  with 
his  continental  insolence,  did  not  care  a 
sou  what  impertinences  Lord  Denbigh  and 
Lord  Trentham  might  or  might  not  have 
attempted  towards  their  female  cousins. 
He  simply  read  his  Clarissa  and  lifted  up 


SAMUEL  RICHARDSON  35 

his  voice  and  wept :  and  so,  to  do  her  jus- 
tice, did  Lady  Mary  herself.  'This  Rich- 
'ardson,'  she  writes,  'is  a  strange  fellow. 
'  I  heartily  despise  him  and  eagerly  read 
'him,  nay,  sob  over  his  works  in  a  most 
<  scandalous  manner.' 

The  effect  produced  upon  Rousseau  by 
Richardson  is  historical.  Without  Clarissa 
there  would  have  been  no  Noitvelle  Helo'ise, 
and  had  there  been  no  Nouvelle  Helo'ise 
everyone  of  us  would  have  been  somewhat 
different  from  what  we  are. 

The  elaborate  eulogy  of  Diderot  is  well- 
known,  and  though  extravagant  in  parts  is 
full  of  true  criticism.  One  sentence  only 
I  will  quote :  '  I  have  observed,'  he  says, 
'  that  in  a  company  where  the  works  of 
'  Richardson  were  reading  either  privately 
'or  aloud  the  conversation  at  once  became 
'more  interesting  and  animating.'  This, 
surely,  is  a  legitimate  test  to  which  to 
submit  a  novel.  You  sometimes  hear  peo- 
ple say  of  a  book,  'Oh,  it  is  not  worth 
'  talking  about !  I  was  only  reading  it.' 

The  great  Napoleon  was  a  true  Richard- 
sonian.  Only  once  did  he  ever  seem  to 
take  any  interest  in  an  Englishman.  It 


36  SAMUEL  RICHARDSON 

was  whilst  he  was  first  consul  and  when 
he  was  introduced  to  an  officer  called 
Lovelace,  '  Why,'  he  exclaimed  with  emo- 
tion, 'that  is  the  name  of  the  man  in 
'  Clarissa  ! '  When  our  own  great  critic, 
Hazlitt,  heard  of  this  incident  he  fell  in 
love  with  Napoleon  on  the  spot,  and  sub- 
sequently wrote  his  life  in  numerous  vol- 
umes. 

In  Germany  Clarissa  had  a  great  sale,  and 
those  of  you  who  are  acquainted  with  Ger- 
man sentiment,  will  have  no  difficulty  in 
tracing  a  good  deal  of  it  to  its  original 
fountain  in  Fleet  Street. 

As  a  man,  Richardson  had  perhaps  only 
two  faults.  He  was  very  nervous  on  the 
subject  of  his  health  and  he  was  very  vain. 
His  first  fault  gave  a  great  deal  of  trouble 
to  his  wives  and  families,  his  second 
afforded  nobody  anything  but  pleasure. 
The  vanity  of  a  distinguished  man,  if  at 
the  same  time  he  happens  to  be  a  good 
man,  is  a  quality  so  agreeable  in  its  mani- 
festations that  to  look  for  it  and  not  to 
find  it  would  be  to  miss  a  pleasure. 
When  the  French  poet  Boileau  was  in- 
vited to  Versailles  by  Louis  Quatorze,  he 


SAMUEL  RICHARDSON  37 

was  much  annoyed  by  the  vanity  of  that 
monarch.  'Whenever,'  said  he,  'the  con- 
'versation  left  the  king's  doings'  —  and, 
let  us  guess,  just  approached  the  poet's 
verses  —  'his  majesty  always  had  a  yawn- 
'  ing-fit,  or  suggested  a  walk  on  the  ter- 
'race.'  The  fact  is,  it  is  not  vanity,  but 
contending  vanities,  that  give  pain. 

As  for  those  of  you  who  cannot  read 
Richardson's  nineteen  volumes,  it  can 
only  be  said  you  are  a  large  and  intel- 
ligent class  of  persons.  You  number 
amongst  you  poets  like  Byron  —  for  I 
presume  Byron  is  still  among  the  poets  — 
and  philosophers  like  d'Alembert,  who, 
when  asked  whether  Richardson  was  not 
right  in  imitating  Nature,  replied,  '  Yes, 
'  but  not  to  the  point  of  ennui.'  We  must 
not  bear  you  malice  or  blacken  your  pri- 
vate characters.  On  the  other  hand,  you 
must  not  sneer  at  us  or  call  us  milksops. 
There  is  nothing  to  be  proud  of,  I  can 
assure  you,  in  not  being  able  to  read  Cla- 
rissa Harlowe,  or  to  appreciate  the  genius 
which  created  Lovelace. 

A  French  critic,  M.  Scherer,  has  had  the 
audacity  to  doubt  whether  Tristram  Shandy 


38  SAMUEL   RICHARDSON 

is  much  read  in  England,  and  it  is  com- 
monly asserted  in  France  that  Clarissa  is 
too  good  for  us.  Tristram  may  be  left  to 
his  sworn  admirers  who  could  at  any  mo- 
ment take  the  field  with  all  the  pomp  and 
circumstance  of  war,  but  with  Clarissa  it  is 
different.  Her  bodyguard  is  small  and 
often  in  need  of  recruits.  This  indeed  is 
my  apology  for  the  trouble  I  have  put  you 
to. 


EDWARD    GIBBON 

A    LECTURE 

'  IT  was  at  Rome,  on  the  1 5th  of  October, 
'  1764,  as  I  sat  musing  amidst  the  ruins  of 
'the  Capitol,  while  the  bare-footed  fryars 
'  were  singing  vespers  in  the  Temple  of  Ju- 
'  piter  that  the  idea  of  writing  the  Decline 
'and  Fall  of  the  City  first  started  to  my 
'mind. 

'  It  was  on  the  day,  or  rather  night,  of 
'the  27th  of  June,  1787,  between  the  hours 
'  of  eleven  and  twelve,  that  I  wrote  the  last 
'  lines  of  the  last  page,  in  a  summer-house 
'  in  my  garden.  After  laying  down  my  pen 
'I  took  several  turns  in  a  berceau,  or  covered 
'  walk  of  acacias,  which  commands  a  pros- 
'  pect  of  the  country,  the  lake  and  the  moun- 
'  tains.  The  air  was  temperate,  the  sky  was 
'serene,  the  silver  orb  of  the  moon  was 
'reflected  from  the  waters  and  all  nature 
'  was  silent.  I  will  not  dissemble  the  first 
'  emotions  of  joy  on  recovery  of  my  freedom 

39 


40  EDWARD   GIBBON' 

'and  perhaps  of  the  establishment  of  my 
'fame.  But  my  pride  was  soon  humbled 
'and  a  sober  melancholy  was  spread  over 
'  my  mind  by  the  idea  that  I  had  taken  an 
'  everlasting  leave  of  an  old  and  agreeable 
'companion,  and  that  whatever  might  be 
'  the  future  date  of  my  history,  the  life  of 
'the  historian  must  be  short  and  preca- 
'rious.' 

Between  these  two  passages  lies  the  ro- 
mance of  Gibbon's  life  —  a  romance  which 
must  be  looked  for,  not,  indeed,  in  the  vol- 
umes, whether  the  original  quartos  or  the 
subsequent  octavos,  of  his  history  —  but  in 
the  elements  which  went  to  make  that  his- 
tory what  it  is  :  the  noble  conception,  the 
shaping  intellect,  the  mastered  learning,  the 
stately  diction  and  the  daily  toil. 

Mr.  Bagehot  has  declared  that  the  way 
to  reverence  Gibbon  is  not  to  read  him  at 
all,  but  to  look  at  him,  from  outside,  in 
the  bookcase,  and  think  how  much  there  is 
within ;  what  a  course  of  events,  what  a 
muster-roll  of  names,  what  a  steady  solemn 
sound.  All  Mr.  Bagehot's  jokes  have  a 
kernel  inside  them.  The  supreme  merit  of 
Gibbon's  history  is  not  to  be  found  in  deep 


EDWARD    GIBBON  41 

thoughts,  or  in  wide  views,  or  in  profound 
knowledge  of  human  nature,  or  prophetic 
vision.  Seldom  was  there  an  historian  less 
well-equipped  with  these  fine  things  than  he. 
Its  glory  is  its  architecture,  its  structure,  its 
organism.  There  it  is,  it  is  worth  looking 
at,  for  it  is  invulnerable,  indispensable,  im- 
mortal. The  metaphors  which  have  been 
showered  upon  it,  prove  how  fond  people 
have  been  of  looking  at  it  from  outside. 
It  has  been  called  a  Bridge,  less  obviously 
an  Aqueduct,  more  prosaically  a  Road. 
We  applaud  the  design  and  marvel  at  the 
execution. 

There  is  something  mournful  in  this 
chorus  of  approbation  in  which  it  is  not 
difficult  to  detect  the  notes  of  surprise.  It 
tells  a  tale  of  infirmity  both  of  life  and  pur- 
pose. A  complete  thing  staggers  us.  We 
are  accustomed  to  failure. 

'  What  act  proves  all  its  thought  had  been  ? ' 

The  will  is  weak,  opportunities  are  barren, 
temper  uncertain  and  life  short. 

'  I  thought  all  labour,  yet  no  less, 
Bear  up  beneath  their  unsuccess; 
Look  at  the  end  of  work :  contrast 
The  petty  done  —  the  undone  vast.' 


42  EDWARD   GIBBON 

It  is  Gibbon's  triumph  that  he  made  his 
thoughts  acts.  He  is  not  exactly  what 
you  call  a  pious  writer,  but  he  is  provoca- 
tive of  at  least  one  pious  feeling.  A  sab- 
batical calm  results  from  the  contemplation 
of  his  labours.  Succeeding  scholars  have 
read  his  history  and  pronounced  it  good. 
It  is  likewise  finished.  Hence  this  feeling 
of  surprise. 

Gibbon's  life  has  the  simplicity  of  an 
epic.  His  work  was  to  write  his  history. 
Nothing  else  was  allowed  to  rob  this  idea  of 
its  majesty.  It  brooked  no  rival  near  its 
throne.  It  dominated  his  life,  for  though 
a  man  of  pleasure,  and,  to  speak  plainly,  a 
good  bit  of  a  coxcomb,  he  had  always  the 
cadences  of  the  Decline  and  Fall  in  his 
ears.  It  has  been  wittily  said  of  him,  that 
he  came  at  last  to  believe  that  he  was  the 
Roman  Empire,  or,  at  all  events,  something 
equally  majestic  and  imposing.  His  life 
had,  indeed,  its  episodes,  but  so  has  an  epic. 
Gibbon's  episodes  are  interesting,  abrupt, 
and  always  concluded.  In  his  sixteenth 
year  he,  without  the  aid  of  a  priest  or  the 
seductions  of  ritual,  read  himself  into  the 
Church  of  Rome,  and  was  one  fine  June 


EDWARD   GIBBON  43 

morning  in  1753  baptized  by  a  Jesuit  father. 
By  Christmas,  1754,  he  had  read  himself 
out  again.  Gibbon's  conversion  was  per- 
fectly genuine  and  should  never  be  spoken 
of  otherwise  than  respectfully,  but  it  was 
entirely  a  matter  of  books  and  reading. 
'  Persons  influence  us,'  cries  Dr.  Newman, 
'  voices  melt  us,  looks  subdue  us,  deeds 
'  inflame  us.  Many  a  man  will  live  and  die 
'  upon  a  dogma ;  no  man  will  be  a  martyr 
'for  a  conclusion.'  It  takes  all  sorts  to 
make  a  world,  and  our  plump  historian  was 
one  of  those  whose  actions  are  determined 
in  libraries,  whose  lives  are  unswayed  by 
personal  influences,  to  whom  conclusions 
may  mean  a  great  deal,  but  dogmas  cer- 
tainly nothing.  Whether  Gibbon  on  leav- 
ing off  his  Catholicism  ever  became  a  Prot- 
estant again,  except  in  the  sense  that 
Bayle  declared  himself  one,  is  doubtful. 
But  all  this  makes  an  interesting  episode. 
The  second  episode  is  his  well-known  love 
affair  with  Mademoiselle  Curchod,  after- 
wards Madame  Neckar  and  the  mother  of 
that  social  portent,  Madame  de  Stael. 
Gibbon,  of  course,  behaved  badly  in  this 
affair.  He  fell  in  love,  made  known  his 


44  EDWARD    GIBBON 

plight,  obtained  mademoiselle's  consent, 
and  then  speeded  home  to  tell  his  father. 
'  Love,'  said  he,  '  will  make  me  eloquent.' 
The  elder  Gibbon  would  not  hear  of  it  : 
the  younger  tamely  acquiesced.  His  very 
acquiescence,  like  all  else  about  him,  has 
become  classical.  '  I  sighed  as  a  lover, 
'I  obeyed  as  a  son.'  He  proceeds  :  'My 
'wound  was  insensibly  healed  by  time,  ab- 
'sence  and  the  habits  of  a  new  life.'  It 
is  shocking.  Never,  surely,  was  love  so 
flouted  before.  Gibbon  is  charitably  sup- 
posed by  some  persons  to  have  regretted 
Paganism,  but  it  was  lucky  for  both  him 
and  for  me  that  the  gods  had  abandoned 
Olympus,  since  otherwise  it  would  have 
required  the  pen  of  a  Greek  dramatist  to 
depict  the  horrors  that  must  have  eventu- 
ally overtaken  him  for  so  impious  an  out- 
rage ;  as  it  was,  he  simply  grew  fatter 
every  day.  A  very  recent  French  biog- 
rapher of  Madame  Neckar,  who  has  pub- 
lished some  letters  of  Gibbon's  for  the 
first  time,  evidently  expects  his  readers  to 
get  very  angry  with  this  perfidious  son  of 
Albion.  It  is  much  too  late  to  get  angry. 
Of  all  the  many  wrongs  women  suffer  at 


EDWARD    GIBBON  45 

the  hands  of  men,  that  of  not  marrying 
them,  is  the  one  they  ought  to  find  it  easi- 
est to  forgive ;  they  generally  do  forgive. 
Madame  Neckar  forgave,  and  if  she,  why 
not  you  and  I  ?  Years  after  she  welcomed 
Gibbon  to  her  house,  and  there  he  used  to 
sit,  fat  and  famous,  tapping  his  snuff-box 
and  arranging  his  ruffles,  and  watching 
with  a  smile  of  complacency  the  infantine, 
yet  I  doubt  not,  the  pronounced  gambols 
of  the  vivacious  Corinne.  After  Neckar's 
fall,  Gibbon  writes  to  Madame  :  '  Your  hus- 
'  band's  condition  is  always  worthy  of  envy, 
'he  knows  himself,  his  enemies  respect 
'him,  Europe  admires  him,  you  love  him.' 
I  decline  to  be  angry  with  such  a  man. 

His  long  residence  in  Switzerland,  an 
unusual  thing  in  those  days,  makes  a  third 
episode,  which,  in  so  far  as  it  led  him  to 
commence  author  in  the  French  language, 
and  to  study  Pascal  as  a  master  of  style,  was 
not  without  its  effects  on  his  history,  but 
it  never  diverted  him  from  his  studies  or 
changed  their  channels.  Though  he  lived 
fifteen  years  in  Lausanne,  he  never  climbed 
a  mountain  or  ever  went  to  the  foot  of  one, 
for  though  not  wholly  indifferent  to  Na- 


46  EDWARD   GIBBON 

ture,  he  loved  to  see  her  framed  in  a  win- 
dow. He  actually  has  the  audacity,  in  a 
note  to  his  fifty-ninth  chapter,  to  sneer  at 
St.  Bernard  because  that  true  lover  of  na- 
ture on  one  occasion,  either  because  his 
joy  in  the  external  world  at  times  inter- 
fered with  his  devotions,  or,  as  I  think, 
because  he  was  bored  by  the  vulgar  rhapso- 
dies of  his  monkish  companions,  abstained 
from  looking  at  the  lake  of  Geneva.  Gib- 
bon's note  is  characteristic,  'To  admire 
'or  despise  St.  Bernard  as  he  ought,  the 
'reader  should  have  before  the  windows  of 
'  his  library  the  beauty  of  that  incomparable 
'landscape.'  St.  Bernard  was  to  Gibbon, 
as  Wordsworth  to  Pope, 

1  A  forest  seer, 

A  minstrel  of  the  natural  year, 
A  lover  true  who  knew  by  heart 
Each  joy  the  mountain  dales  impart.' 

He  was  proud  to  confess  that  whatever 
knowledge  he  had  of  the  scriptures  he 
had'  acquired  chiefly  in  the  woods  and  the 
fields,  and  that  beeches  and  oaks  had  been 
his  best  teachers  of  the  Word  of  God. 
One  cannot  fancy  Gibbon  in  a  forest.  But 
if  Gibbon  had  not  been  fonder  of  the  library 


EDWARD    CIS  BON  47 

than  of  the  lake,  though  he  might  have 
known  more  than  he  did  of  '  moral  evil  and 
'  of  good,'  he  would  hardly  have  been  the 
author  he  was. 

But  the  Decline  and  Fall 'was  threatened 
from  a  quarter  more  likely  to  prove  dan- 
gerous than  the  'incomparable  landscape.' 
On  September  loth,  1774,  Gibbon  writes  : 

'Yesterday  morning  about  half-past 
'  seven,  as  I  was  destroying  an  army  of 
'  barbarians,  I  heard  a  double  rap  at  the 
'  door  and  my  friend  Mr.  Eliot  was  soon 
'  introduced.  After  some  idle  conversa- 
'  tion  he  told  me  that  if  I  was  desirous  of 
'  being  in  parliament  he  had  an  indepen- 
'  dent  seat,  very  much  at  my  service.  This 
'  is  a  fine  prospect  opening  upon  me,  and 
'  if  next  spring  I  should  take  my  seat  and 
'  publish  my  book  —  (he  meant  the  first 
'  volume  only)  —  it  will  be  a  very  memo- 
'  rable  era  in  my  life.  I  am  ignorant  whether 
'  my  borough  will  be  Liskeard  or  St.  Ger- 
'  mains.' 

Mr.  Eliot  controlled  four  boroughs  and 
it  was  Liskeard  that  became  Gibbon's, 
and  for  ten  years,  though  not  always  for 
Liskeard,  he  sat  in  parliament.  Ten  most 


48  EDWARD   GIBBON 

eventful  years  they  were  too,  both  in  our 
national  and  parliamentary  history.  This 
might  have  been  not  an  episode,  but  a 
catastrophe.  Mr.  Eliot's  untimely  entrance 
might  not  merely  have  postponed  the 
destruction  of  a  horde  of  barbarians,  but 
have  destroyed  the  history  itself.  However 
Mr.  Gibbon  never  opened  his  mouth  in 
the  House  of  Commons  ;  '  I  assisted,'  says 
he,  in  his  magnificent  way, '  at,'  (mark  the 
preposition,)  'at  the  debates  of  a  free  assem- 
'  bly,'  that  is,  he  supported  Lord  North.  He 
was  not  from  the  first  content  to  be  a  mute; 
he  prepared  a  speech  and  almost  made  up 
his  mind  to  catch  Sir  Fletcher  Norton's 
eye.  The  subject,  no  mean  one,  was  to  be 
the  American  war ;  but  his  courage  oozed 
away,  he  did  not  rise  in  his  place.  A  month 
after  he  writes  from  Boodle's:  'I  am  still 
'a  mute,  it  is  more  tremendous  than  I 
'  imagined  ;  the  great  speakers  fill  me  with 
'despair,  the  bad  ones  with  terror.'  In  1779 
his  silent  assistance  was  rewarded  with  a 
seat  at  the  Board  of  Trade,  and  a  salary  of 
between  seven  and  eight  hundred  a  year. 
Readers  of  Burke's  great  speech  on  Eco- 
nomical Reform  will  remember  the  twenty 


EDWARD    GIBBON  49 

minutes  he  devoted  to  this  marvellous  Board 
of  Trade,  with  its  perpetual  virtual  adjourn- 
ment and  unbroken  sitting  vacation.  Such 
was  Gibbon's  passion  for  style  that  he 
listened  to  the  speech  with  delight,  and 
gives  us  the  valuable  assurance  that  it 
was  spoken  just  as  it  reads,  and  that  no- 
body enjoyed  either  hearing  or  reading  it 
more  than  he  did.  What  a  blessing  it  is 
to  have  a  good  temper !  But  Gibbon's 
constituency  did  not  approve  of  his  becom- 
ing a  minister's  man,  and  he  lost  his  seat 
at  the  general  election  of  1783.  'Mr. 
'Eliot,'  this  is  Gibbon's  account  of  it,  'Mr. 
'  Eliot  was  now  deeply  engaged  in  the 
'  measures  of  opposition  and  the  electors 
'  of  Liskeard  are  commonly  of  the  same 
'  opinion  as  Mr.  Eliot.'  Lord  North  found 
him  another  seat,  and  for  a  short  time  he 
sat  in  the  new  parliament  for  the  important 
seaport  of  Lymington,  but  his  office  being 
abolished  in  1784,  he  bade  parliament  and 
England  farewell,  and,  taking  his  library 
with  him,  departed  for  Lausanne  to  con- 
clude his  history. 

Gibbon,  after  completing  his  history,  en- 
tertained notions  of  writing   other  books, 


5O  EDWARD    GIBBON 

but,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  he  had  but  one 
thing  left  him  to  do  in  order  to  discharge 
his  duty  to  the  universe.  He  had  written 
a  magnificent  history  of  the  Roman  Em- 
pire. It  remained  to  write  the  history  of 
the  historian.  Accordingly  we  have  the 
autobiography.  These  two  immortal  works 
act  and  react  upon  one  another ;  the  his- 
tory sends  us  to  the  autobiography,  and 
the  autobiography  returns  us  to  the  his- 
tory. 

The  style  of  the  autobiography  is  better 
than  that  of  the  history.  The  awful  word 
'verbose'  has  been  launched  against  cer- 
tain pages  of  the  history  by  a  critic,  for- 
midable and  friendly  —  the  great  Person. 
There  is  not  a  superfluous  word  in  the 
autobiography.  The  fact  is,  in  this  matter 
of  style,  Gibbon  took  a  great  deal  more 
pains  with  himself  than  he  did  with  the 
empire.  He  sent  the  history,  except  the 
first  volume,  straight  to  his  printer  from 
his  first  rough  copy.  He  made  six  differ- 
ent sketches  of  the  autobiography.  It  is 
a  most  studied  performance,  and  may  be 
boldly  pronounced  perfect.  Not  to  know 
it  almost  by  heart  is  to  deny  yourself  a 


EDWARD    GIBBON  51 

great  and  wholly  innocent  pleasure.  Of 
the  history  it  is  permissible  to  say  with 
Mr.  Silas  Wegg,  '  I  haven't  been,  not  to 
'say  right  slap  through  him  very  lately, 
'having  been  otherwise  employed,  Mr. 
'  Boffin  ;  '  but  the  autobiography  is  no 
more  than  a  good-sized  pamphlet.  It  has 
had  the  reward  of  shortness.  It  is  not 
only  our  best,  but  our  best  known  auto- 
biography. Almost  its  first  sentence  is 
about  the  style  it  is  to  be  in :  '  The  style 
'  shall  be  simple  and  familiar,  but  style  is 
'the  image  of  character,  and  the  habits 
'of  correct  writing  may  produce  without 
'labour  or  design  the  appearance  of  art 
'  and  study.'  There  is  nothing  artless  or 
unstudied  about  the  autobiography,  but  is 
it  not  sometimes  a  relief  to  exchange  the 
quips  and  cranks  of  some  of  our  modern 
writers,  whose  humour  it  is  to  be  as  it 
were  for  ever  slapping  their  readers  in 
the  face  or  grinning  at  them  from  unex- 
pected corners,  for  the  stately  roll  of  the 
Gibbonian  sentence  ?  The  style  settled, 
he  proceeds  to  say  something  about  the 
pride  of  race,  but  the  pride  of  letters  soon 
conquers  it,  and  as  we  glance  down  the 


52  EDWARD   GIBBON 

page  we  see  advancing  to  meet  us,  curling 
its  head,  as  Shakespeare  says  of  billows  in 
a  storm,  the  god-like  sentence  which  makes 
it  for  ever  certain,  not  indeed  that  there 
will  never  be  a  better  novel  than  Tom 
Jones,  for  that  I  suppose  is  still  just  pos- 
sible, but  that  no  novel  can  ever  receive  so 
magnificent  a  compliment.  The  sentence 
is  well  known  but  irresistible. 

'  Our    immortal    Fielding  was    of    the 
'  younger  branch  of  the  Earls  of  Denbigh 

*  who  draw  their  origin  from  the  Counts  of 

*  Hapsburg.     Far  different  have  been  the 
'fortunes  of  the  English  and  German  divis- 
'ions   of    the    family.       The   former,    the 
'knights   and   sheriffs    of    Leicestershire, 
'have   slowly   risen   to   the    dignity   of   a 
'  peerage,    the    latter,    the    Emperors    of 
'  Germany  and  Kings  of  Spain,  have  threat- 
'ened  the  liberty  of  the  old  and  invaded 
'  the   treasures   of  the   new   world.      The 
'successors    of    Charles    the    Fifth    may 
'  disdain   their   brethren   of   England,  but 
'  the  romance  of  Tom  Jones,  that  exquisite 
'  picture  of  human  manners,  will  outlive  the 
'Palace  of  the  Escurial,  and  the  imperial 
'eagle  of  the  House  of  Austria.' 


EDWAKD    GIBBON  53 

Well  might  Thackeray  exclaim  in  his 
lecture  on  Fielding,  'There  can  be  no 
'gainsaying  the  sentence  of  this  great 
'judge.  To  have  your  name  mentioned 
'  by  Gibbon  is  like  having  it  written  on  the 
'dome  of  St.  Peter's.  Pilgrims  from  all 
'  the  world  admire  and  behold  it.' 

After  all  this  preliminary  magnificence 
Gibbon  condescends  to  approach  his  own 
pedigree.  There  was  not  much  to  tell, 
and  the  little  there  was  he  did  not  know. 
A  man  of  letters  whose  memory  is  re- 
spected by  all  lovers  of  old  books  and 
Elizabethan  lyrics,  Sir  Egerton  Brydges, 
was  a  cousin  of  Gibbon's,  and  as  geneal- 
ogies were  this  unfortunate  man's  consum- 
ing passion,  he  of  course  knew  all  that 
Gibbon  ought  to  have  known  about  the 
family,  and  speaks  with  a  herald's  con- 
tempt of  the  historian's  perfunctory  inves- 
tigations. 'It  is  a  very  unaccountable 
'  thing,'  says  Sir  Egerton,  '  that  Gibbon 
'was  so  ignorant  of  the  immediate  branch 
'of  the  family  whence  he  sprang  ';  but  the 
truth  is  that  Gibbon  was  far  prouder  of 
his  Palace  of  the  Escurial,  and  his  imperial 
eagle  of  the  House  of  Austria,  than  of  his 


54 


EDWARD   GIBBON 


family  tree,  which  was  indeed  of  the  most 
ordinary  hedge-row  description.  His  grand- 
father was  a  South  Sea  director,  and  when 
the  bubble  burst  he  was  compelled  by  act 
of  parliament  to  disclose  on  oath  his  whole 
fortune.  He  returned  it  at  ,£106,543  5s- 
6d.,  exclusive  of  antecedent  settlements. 
It  was  all  confiscated,  and  then  £,  10,000 
was  voted  the  poor  man  to  begin  again 
upon.  Such  bold  oppression,  says  the 
grandson,  can  scarcely  be  shielded  by  the 
omnipotence  of  parliament.  The  old  man 
did  not  keep  his  ;£  10,000  in  a  napkin, 
and  speedily  began,  as  his  grandson  puts 
it,  to  erect  on  the  ruins  of  the  old,  the 
edifice  of  a  new  fortune.  The  ruins  must, 
I  think,  have  been  more  spacious  than  the 
affidavit  would  suggest,  for  when  only 
sixteen  years  afterwards,  the  elder  Gibbon 
died  he  was  found  to  be  possessed  of 
considerable  property  in  Sussex,  Hamp- 
shire, Buckinghamshire,  and  the  New 
River  Company,  as  well  as  of  a  spacious 
house  with  gardens  and  grounds  at  Putney. 
A  fractional  share  of  this  inheritance  se- 
cured to  our  historian  the  liberty  of  action 
so  necessary  for  the  accomplishment  of  his 


EDWARD    GIBBON  55 

great  design.  Large  fortunes  have  their 
uses.  Mr.  Milton,  the  scrivener,  Mr.  Gib- 
bon, the  South  Sea  director,  and  Dr. 
Darwin  of  Shrewsbury  had  respectively 
something  to  do  with  Paradise  Lost,  The 
Decline  and  Fall,  and  The  Origin  of  Species. 

The  most,  indeed  the  only,  interesting 
fact  about  the  Gibbon  entourage  is  that 
the  greatest  of  English  mystics,  William 
Law,  the  inimitable  author  of  A  Serious 
Call  to  a  Devout  and  Holy  Life,  adapted  to 
the  State  and  Conditions  of  all  Orders  of 
Christians,  was  long  tutor  to  the  histo- 
rian's father,  and  in  that  capacity  accom- 
panied the  future  historian  to  Emanuel 
College,  Cambridge,  and  was  afterwards, 
and  till  the  end  of  his  days,  spiritual  di- 
rector to  Miss  Hester  Gibbon,  the  histori- 
an's eccentric  maiden  aunt. 

It  is  an  unpleasing  impertinence  for 
anyone  to  assume  that  nobody  save  him- 
self reads  any  particular  book.  I  read 
with  astonishment  the  other  day  that  Sir 
Humphry  Davy's  Consolations  in  Travel ; 
or,  The  Closing  Days  of  a  Philosopher  s 
Life,  was  a  curious  and  totally  forgotten 
work.  It  is,  however,  always  safe  to  say 


56  EDWARD    GIBBON 

of  a  good  book  that  it  is  not  read  as  much 
as  it  ought  to  be,  and  of  Law's  Serious 
Call  you  may  add,  '  or  as  much  as  it  used 
'  to  be.'  It  is  a  book  with  a  strange  and 
moving  spiritual  pedigree.  Dr.  Johnson, 
one  remembers,  took  it  up  carelessly  at 
Oxford,  expecting  to  find  it  a  dull  book, 
'as,'  (the  words  are  his,  not  mine,)  'such 
'books  generally  are;  but,'  he  proceeds,  'I 
'  found  Law  an  overmatch  for  me,  and  this 
'was  the  first  occasion  of  my  thinking  in 
'earnest.'  George  Whitfield  writes,  'Soon 
'after  my  coming  up  to  the  university, 
'  seeing  a  small  edition  of  Mr.  Law's  Seri- 
' ous  Call  in  a  friend's  hand,  I  soon  pur- 
'  chased  it.  God  worked  powerfully  upon 
'my  soul  by  that  excellent  treatise.'  The 
celebrated  Thomas  Scott,  of  Aston  Sand- 
ford,  with  the  confidence  of  his  school, 
dates  the  beginning  of  his  spiritual  life 
from  the  hour  when  he  'carelessly,'  as  he 
says,  '  took  up  Mr.  Law's  Serious  Call,  a 
'book  I  had  hitherto  treated  with  con- 
'  tempt.'  When  we  remember  how  New- 
man in  his  Apologia  speaks  of  Thomas 
Scott  as  the  writer  'to  whom,  humanly 
'speaking,  I  almost  owe  my  soul,'  we  be- 


EDWARD    GIBBON  57 

come  lost  amidst  a  mazy  dance  of  strange, 
spectral  influences  which  flit  about  the 
centuries  and  make  us  what  we  are. 
Splendid  achievement  though  the  History 
of  the  Decline  and  Fall  may  be,  glorious 
monument  though  it  is,  more  lasting 
than  brass,  of  learning  and  industry,  yet 
in  sundry  moods  it  seems  but  a  poor  and 
barren  thing  by  the  side  of  a  book  which, 
like  Law's  Serious  Call,  has  proved  its 
power 

'  To  pierce  the  heart  and  tame  the  will.' 

But  I  must  put  the  curb  on  my  enthusiasm, 
or  I  shall  find  myself  re-echoing  the  sen- 
timent of  a  once  celebrated  divine  who 
brought  down  Exeter  Hall  by  proclaiming, 
at  the  top  of  his  voice,  that  he  would  sooner 
be  the  author  of  The  Washerwoman  on 
Salisbury  Plain  than  of  Paradise  Lost. 

But  Law's  Serious  Call,  to  do  it  only 
bare  literary  justice,  is  a  great  deal  more 
like  Paradise  Lost  than  The  Washerwoman 
on  Salisbury  Plain,  and  deserves  better 
treatment  at  the  hands  of  religious  people 
than  to  be  reprinted,  as  it  too  often  is,  in 
a  miserable,  truncated,  witless  form  which 
would  never  have  succeeded  in  arresting 


58  EDWARD   CIS  BON 

the  wandering  attention  of  Johnson  or  in 
saving  the  soul  of  Thomas  Scott.  The 
motto  of  all  books  of  original  genius  is  : 

'  Love  me  or  leave  me  alone.' 

Gibbon  read  Law's  Serious  Call,  but  it 
left  him  where  it  found  him.  '  Had  not,' 
so  he  writes,  '  Law's  vigorous  mind  been 
'  clouded  by  enthusiasm,  he  might  be  ranked 
'with  the  most  agreeable  and  ingenious 
'writers  of  his  time.' 

Upon  the  death  of  Law  in  1761,  it  is  sad 
to  have  to  state  that  Miss  Hester  Gibbon 
cast  aside  the  severe  rule  of  female  dress 
which  he  had  expounded  in  his  Serious  Call, 
and  she  had  practised  for  sixty  years  of  her 
life.  She  now  appeared  like  Malvolio,  re- 
splendent in  yellow  stockings.  Still,  it  was 
something  to  have  kept  the  good  lady's 
feet  from  straying  into  such  evil  garments 
for  so  long.  Miss  Gibbon  had  a  comfort- 
able estate  ;  and  our  historian,  as  her  near- 
est male  relative,  kept  his  eye  upon  the 
reversion.  The  fifteenth  and  sixteenth 
chapters  had  created  a  coolness,  but  he 
addressed  her  a  letter  in  which  he  assured 
her  that,  allowing  for  differences  of  expres- 


EDWARD    GIBBON  59 

sion,  he  had  the  satisfaction  of  feeling  that 
practically  he  and  she  thought  alike  on  the 
great  subject  of  religion.  Whether  she 
believed  him  or  not  I  cannot  say ;  but  she 
left  him  her  estate  in  Sussex.  I  must  stop 
a  moment  to  consider  the  hard  and  far  dif- 
ferent fate  of  Person.  Gibbon  had  taken 
occasion  to  refer  to  the  seventh  verse  of 
the  fifth  chapter  of  the  First  Epistle  of  St. 
John  as  spurious.  It  has  now  disappeared 
from  our  Bibles,  without  leaving  a  trace 
even  in  the  margin.  So  judicious  a  writer 
as  Dean  Alford  long  ago,  in  his  Greek  Tes- 
tament, observed,  'There  is  not  a  shadow 
'of  a  reason  for  supposing  it  genuine.' 
An  archdeacon  of  Gibbon's  period  thought 
otherwise,  and  asserted  the  genuineness  of 
the  text,  whereupon  Person  wrote  a  book 
and  proved  it  to  be  no  portion  of  the  in- 
spired text.  On  this  a  female  relative  who 
had  Person  down  in  her  will  for  a  comfort- 
able annuity  of  ^300,  revoked  that  part 
of  her  testamentary  disposition,  and  sub- 
stituted a  paltry  bequest  of  ^30 :  '  for,' 
said  she,  '  I  hear  he  has  been  writing 
'  against  the  Holy  Scriptures.'  As  Person 
only  got  £16  for  writing  the  book,  it  cer- 


60  EDWARD   GIBBON 

tainly  cost  him  dear.  But  the  book  remains 
a  monument  of  his  learning  and  wit.  The 
last  quarter  of  the  annuity  must  long  since 
have  been  paid. 

Gibbon,  the  only  one  of  a  family  of  five 
who  managed  to  grow  up  at  all,  had  no 
school  life ;  for  though  a  short  time  at 
Westminster,  his  feeble  health  prevented 
regularity  of  attendance.  His  father  never 
won  his  respect,  nor  his  mother  (who  died 
when  he  was  ten)  his  affection.  '  I  am 
'tempted,'  he  says,  'to  enter  my  protest 
'against  the  trite  and  lavish  praise  of  the 
'happiness  of  our  boyish  years  which  is 
'echoed  with  so  much  affectation  in  the 
'world.  That  happiness  I  have  never 
'known.'  Upon  which  passage  Ste. 
Beuve  characteristically  remarks  '  that  it 
'is  those  who  have  been  deprived  of  a 
'mother's  solicitude,  of  the  down  and 
'flower  of  tender  affection,  of  the  vague 
'yet  penetrating  charm  of  dawning  im- 
'pressions,  who  are  most  easily  denuded 
'  of  the  sentiment  of  religion.' 

Gibbon  was,  however,  born  free  of  the 
'  fair  brotherhood '  Macaulay  so  exquisitely 
described  in  his  famous  poem,  written 


EDWARD    GIBBON  6 1 

after  the  Edinburgh  election.  Reading 
became  his  sole  employment.  He  enjoyed 
all  the  advantages  of  the  most  irregular  of 
educations,  and  in  his  fifteenth  year  arrived 
at  Oxford,  to  use  his  celebrated  words, 
though  for  that  matter  almost  every  word 
in  the  Autobiography  is  celebrated,  with  a 
stock  of  erudition  that  might  have  puzzled 
a  doctor,  and  a  degree  of  ignorance  of 
which  a  schoolboy  would  have  been  ashamed 
—  for  example,  he  did  not  know  the  Greek 
alphabet,  nor  is  there  any  reason  to  sup- 
pose that  he  would  have  been  taught  it  at 
Oxford. 

I  do  not  propose  to  refer  to  what  he 
says  about  his  university.  I  hate  giving 
pain,  besides  which  there  have  been  new 
statutes  since  1752.  In  Gibbon's  time 
there  were  no  public  examinations  at  all, 
and  no  class-lists  —  a  Saturnian  reign 
which  I  understand  it  is  now  sought  to 
restore.  Had  Gibbon  followed  his  father's 
example  and  gone  to  Cambridge,  he  would 
have  found  the  Mathematical  Tripos 
fairly  started  on  its  beneficent  career,  and 
might  have  taken  as  good  a  place  in  it 
as  Dr.  Dodd  had  just  done,  a  divine 


62  EDWARD    GIBBON 

who  is  still  year  after  year  referred  to  in 
the  University  Calendar  as  the  author  of 
TJioughts  in  Prison,  the  circumstance  that 
the  thinker  was  later  on  taken  from  prison, 
and  hung  by  the  neck  until  he  was  dead 
being  no  less  wisely  than  kindly  omitted 
from  a  publication,  one  of  the  objects  of 
which  is  to  inspire  youth  with  confidence 
that  the  path  of  mathematics  is  the  way 
to  glory. 

On  his  profession  of  Catholicism,  Gib- 
bon, ipso  facto  ceased  to  be  a  member  of 
the  university,  and  his  father,  with  a  sud- 
den accession  of  good  sense,  packed  off 
the  young  pervert,  who  at  that  time  had 
a  very  big  head  and  a  very  small  body, 
and  was  just  as  full  of  controversial  the- 
ology as  he  could  hold,  to  a  Protestant 
pastor's  at  Lausanne,  where  in  an  uncom- 
fortable house,  with  an  ill-supplied  table 
and  a  scarcity  of  pocket-money,  the  ex- 
fellow-commoner  of  Magdalen  was  con- 
demned to  live  from  his  sixteenth  to  his 
twenty-first  year.  His  time  was  mainly 
spent  in  reading.  Here  he  learnt  Greek  ; 
here  also  he  fell  in  love  with  Mademoiselle 
Curchod.  In  the  spring  of  1758  he  came 


EDWARD    GIBBON  63 

home.  He  was  at  first  very  shy,  and  went 
out  but  little,  pursuing  his  studies  even  in 
lodgings  in  Bond  Street.  But  he  was 
shortly  to  be  shaken  out  of  his  dumps,  and 
made  an  Englishman  and  a  soldier. 

If  anything  could  provoke  Gibbon's 
placid  shade,  it  would  be  the  light  and 
airy  way  his  military  experiences  are  often 
spoken  of,  as  if,  like  a  modern  volunteer, 
he  had  but  attended  an  Easter  Monday 
review.  I  do  not  believe  the  history  of 
literature  affords  an  equally  striking  ex- 
ample of  self-sacrifice.  He  was  the  most 
sedentary  of  men.  He  hated  exercise, 
and  rarely  took  any.  Once  after  spending 
some  weeks  in  the  summer  at  Lord  Shef- 
field's country  place,  when  about  to  go, 
his  hat  was  missing.  'When/  he  was 
asked,  '  did  you  last  see  it  ? '  '  On  my  ar- 
rival,' he  replied.  'I  left  it  on  the  hall- 
table  ;  I  have  had  no  occasion  for  it  since.' 
Lord  Sheffield's  guests  always  knew  that 
they  would  find  Mr.  Gibbon  in  the  library, 
and  meet  him  at  the  dinner-table.  He 
abhorred  a  horse.  His  one  vocation,  and 
his  only  avocation,  was  reading,  not  lazy 
glancing  and  skipping,  but  downright  sav- 


64  EDWARD   GIBBON 

age  reading  —  geography,  chronology,  and 
all  the  tougher  sides  of  history.  What 
glorious,  what  martial  times,  indeed,  must 
those  have  been  that  made  Mr.  Gibbon 
leap  into  the  saddle,  desert  his  books,  and 
for  two  mortal  years  and  a  half  live  in 
camps !  He  was  two  months  at  Bland- 
ford,  three  months  at  Cranbrook,  six 
months  at  Dover,  four  months  at  Devizes, 
as  many  at  Salisbury,  and  six  more  at 
Southampton,  where  the  troops  were  dis- 
banded. During  all  this  time  Captain 
Gibbon  was  energetically  employed.  He 
dictated  the  orders  and  exercised  the  bat- 
talion. It  did  him  a  world  of  good.  What 
a  pity  Carlyle  could  not  have  been  sub- 
jected to  the  same  discipline  !  The  cessa- 
tion, too,  of  his  habit  of  continued  reading, 
gave  him  time  for  a  little  thinking,  and 
when  he  returned  to  his  father's  house,  in 
Hampshire,  he  had  become  fixed  in  his 
determination  to  write  a  history,  though 
of  what  was  still  undecided. 

I  am  rather  afraid  to  say  it,  for  no  two 
men  could  well  be  more  unlike  one  another, 
but  Gibbon  always  reminds  me  in  an  odd 
inverted  way  of  Milton.  I  suppose  it  is 


EDWARD    GIBBON  65 

because  as  the  one  is  our  grandest  author, 
so  the  other  is  our  most  grandiose.  Both 
are  self-conscious  and  make  no  apology  — 
Milton  magnificently  self-conscious,  Gibbon 
splendidly  so.  Everyone  knows  the  great 
passages  in  which  Milton,  in  1642,  asked 
the  readers  of  his  pamphlet  on  the  reason 
of  Church  government  urged  against  prel- 
acy, to  go  on  trust  with  him  for  some  years 
for  his  great  unwritten  poem,  as  '  being  a 
'work  not  to  be  raised  from  the  heat  of 
'youth  or  the  vapour  of  wine,  like  that 
'  which  flows  at  waste  from  the  pen  of  some 
'  vulgar  amorist  or  the  trencher  fury  of  a 
'rhyming  parasite,  nor  to  be  obtained  by 
*  the  invocation  of  Dame  Memory  and  her 
'  seven  daughters,  but  by  devout  prayer  to 
'that  Eternal  Spirit  who  can  enrich  with 
'all  utterance  and  knowledge,  and  sends 
'out  His  seraphim  with  the  hallow'd  fire 
'of  His  Altar  to  touch  and  purify  the  lips 
'  of  whom  He  pleases :  to  this  must  be 
'  added  industrious  and  select  reading, 
'  study,  observation  and  insight  into  all 
'  seemly  opinions,  arts,  and  affairs.'  Dif- 
ferent men,  different  minds.  There  are 
things  terrestrial  as  well  as  things  celes- 


66  EDWARD    GIBBON 

tial.  Certainly  Gibbon's  Autobiography 
contains  no  passages  like  those  which  are 
to  be  found  in  Milton's  pamphlets  ;  but 
for  all  that  he,  in  his  mundane  way,  conse- 
crated himself  for  his  self-imposed  task, 
and  spared  no  toil  to  equip  himself  for  it. 
He,  too,  no  less  than  Milton,  had  his  high 
hope  and  his  hard  attempting.  He  tells 
us  in  his  stateliest  way  how  he  first 
thought  of  one  subject,  and  then  another, 
and  what  progress  he  had  made  in  his 
different  schemes  before  he  abandoned 
them,  and  what  reasons  induced  him  so  to 
do.  Providence  watched  over  the  future 
historian  of  the  Roman  Empire  as  surely 
as  it  did  over  the  future  author  of  Para- 
dise Lost,  as  surely  as  it  does  over  every- 
one who  has  it  in  him  to  do  anything  really 
great.  Milton,  we  know,  in  early  life  was 
enamoured  of  King  Arthur,  and  had  it  in 
his  mind  to  make  that  blameless  king  the 
hero  of  his  promised  epic,  but 

1  What  resounds 

In  fable  or  romance  of  Uther's  son, 
Begirt  with  British  and  Amoric  knights,' 

can  brook  a  moment's  comparison  with 
the  baffled  hero  of  Paradise  Lost ;  so  too, 


EDWARD    GIBBON  6/ 

what  a  mercy  that  Gibbon  did  not  fritter 
away  his  splendid  energy,  as  he  once  con- 
templated doing,  on  Sir  Walter  Raleigh, 
or  squander  his  talents  on  a  history  of 
Switzerland  or  even  of  Florence  ! 

After  the  disbanding  of  the  militia  Gib- 
bon obtained  his  father's  consent  to  spend 
the  money  it  was  originally  proposed  to  lay 
out  in  buying  him  a  seat  in  Parliament, 
upon  foreign  travel,  and  early  in  1763 
he  reached  Paris,  where  he  abode  three 
months.  An  accomplished  scholar  whose 
too  early  death  all  who  knew  him  can 
never  cease  to  deplore,  Mr.  Cotter  Mor- 
ison,  whose  sketch  of  Gibbon  is,  by  gen- 
eral consent,  admitted  to  be  one  of  the 
most  valuable  books  of  a  delightful  series, 
does  his  best,  with  but  partial  success,  to 
conceal  his  annoyance  at  Gibbon's  stupidly 
placid  enjoyment  of  Paris  and  French 
cookery.  '  He  does  not  seem  to  be  aware,' 
says  Mr.  Morison,  '  that  he  was  witness- 
'ing  one  of  the  most  singular  social  phases 
'which  have  ever  yet  been  presented  in 
'the  history  of  man.'  Mr.  Morison  does 
not,  indeed,  blame  Gibbon  for  this,  but 
having,  as  he  had,  the  most  intimate  ac- 


68  EDWARD   GIBBON 

quaintance  with  this  period  of  French  his- 
tory, and  knowing  the  tremendous  issues 
involved  in  it,  he  could  not  but  be  cha- 
grined to  notice  how  Gibbon  remained 
callous  and  impervious.  And,  indeed, 
when  the  Revolution  came  it  took  no  one 
more  by  surprise  than  it  did  the  man  who 
had  written  the  Decline  and  Fall  of  the 
Roman  Empire.  Writing,  in  1792,  to 
Lord  Sheffield,  Gibbon  says,  '  Remember 
'  the  proud  fabric  of  the  French  monarchy  : 
'  not  four  years  ago  it  stood  founded,  and 
'  might  it  not  seem  on  the  rock  of  time, 
'  force,  and  opinion,  supported  by  the 
'  triple  authority  of  the  Church,  the  No- 
'  bility,  and  the  Parliament  ? '  But  the 
Revolution  came  for  all  that ;  and  what, 
when  it  did  come,  did  it  teach  Mr.  Gibbon  ? 
'  Do  not,  I  beseech  you,  tamper  with  Par- 
'  liamentary  representation.  If  you  begin 
'  to  improve  the  Constitution,  you  may  be 
'  driven  step  by  step  from  the  disfranchise- 
'ment  of  Old  Sarum  to  the  King  in  New- 
'  gate  ;  the  Lords  voted  useless,  the  bish- 
'ops  abolished,  the  House  of  Commons 
'sans  culottes'  The  importance  of  shut- 
ting off  the  steam  and  sitting  on  the 


EDWARD    GIBBON  69 

safety-valve  was  what  the  French  Revolu- 
tion taught  Mr.  Gibbon.  Mr.  Bagehot 
says  :  '  Gibbon's  horror  of  the  French 
'  Revolution  was  derived  from  the  fact 
'that  be  had  arrived  at  the  conclusion  that 
'  he  was  the  sort  of  person  a  populace  in- 
4  variably  kills.'  An  excellent  reason,  in 
my  opinion,  for  hating  revolution,  but  not 
for  misunderstanding  it. 

After  leaving  Paris  Gibbon  lived  nearly 
a  year  in  Lausanne,  reading  hard  to  pre- 
pare himself  for  Italy.  He  made  his  own 
handbook.  At  last  he  felt  himself  fit  to 
cross  the  Alps,  which  he  did  seated  in  an 
osier  basket  planted  on  a  man's  shoulders. 
He  did  not  envy  Hannibal  his  elephant. 
He  lingered  four  months  in  Florence,  and 
then  entered  Rome  in  a  spirit  of  the  most 
genuine  and  romantic  enthusiasm.  His 
zeal  made  him  positively  active,  though  it 
is  impossible  to  resist  a  smile  at  the  pic- 
ture he  draws  of  himself  '  treading  with  a 
'lofty  step  the  ruins  of  the  Forum.'  He 
was  in  Rome  eighteen  weeks ;  there  he 
had,  as  we  saw  at  the  beginning,  his  heav- 
enly vision,  to  which  he  was  not  disobedi- 
ent. He  paid  a  visit  of  six  weeks'  duration 


70  EDWARD   GIBBON 

to  Naples,  and  then  returned  home  more 
rapidly.  'The  spectacle  of  Venice,'  he  says, 
'afforded  some  hours  of  astonishment.' 
Gibbon  has  sometimes  been  called  'long- 
winded,'  but  when  he  chooses,  nobody 
can  be  shorter  with  either  a  city  or  a 
century. 

He  returned  to  England  in  1765,  and 
for  five  rather  dull  years  lived  in  his 
father's  house  in  the  country  or  in  Lon- 
don lodgings.  In  17/0  his  father  died, 
and  in  1772  Gibbon  took  a  house  in  Ben- 
tinck  Street,  Manchester  Square,  filled  it 
with  books  —  for  in  those  days  it  must  not 
be  forgotten  there  was  no  public  library  of 
any  kind  in  London  —  and  worked  hard  at 
his  first  volume,  which  appeared  in  Febru- 
ary, 1775.  It  made  him  famous,  also  infa- 
mous, since  it  concluded  with  the  fifteenth 
and  sixteenth  chapters  on  Christianity.  ID 
1781  two  more  volumes  appeared.  In  1783 
he  gave  up  Parliament  and  London,  and 
rolled  over  Westminster  Bridge  in  a  post- 
chaise,  on  his  way  to  Lausanne,  where  he 
had  his  home  for  the  rest  of  his  days.  In 
May,  1788,  the  three  last  volumes  appeared. 
He  died  in  St.  James's  Street  whilst  on  a 


EDWARD    GIBBON  /I 

visit  to  London,  on  the  I5th  of  January, 
1794,  of  a  complaint  of  a  most  pronounced 
character,  which  he  had  with  characteristic 
and  almost  criminal  indolence  totally  neg- 
lected for  thirty  years.  He  was  buried  in 
Fletching  Churchyard,  Sussex,  in  the  fam- 
ily burial-place  of  his  faithful  friend  and 
model  editor,  the  first  Lord  Sheffield.  He 
had  not  completed  his  fifty-eighth  year. 

Before  concluding  with  a  few  very  humble 
observations  on  Gibbon's  writings,  some- 
thing ought  to  be  said  about  him  as  a  social 
being.  In  this  aspect  he  had  distinguished 
merit,  though  his  fondness  of,  and  fitness 
for,  society  came  late.  He  had  no  school- 
days, no  college  days,  no  gilded  youth. 
From  sixteen  to  twenty-one  he  lived  poorly 
in  Lausanne,  and  came  home  more  Swiss 
than  English.  Nor  was  his  father  of  any 
use  to  him.  It  took  him  a  long  time  to  rub 
off  his  shyness ;  but  the  militia,  Paris,  and 
Rome,  and,  above  all,  the  proud  conscious- 
ness of  a  noble  design,  made  a  man  of  him, 
and  after  1772  he  became  a  well-known 
figure  in  London  society.  He  was  a  man 
of  fashion  as  well  as  of  letters.  In  this 


72  EDWARD    GIBBON 

respect,  and,  indeed,  in  all  others,  except 
their  common  love  of  learning,  he  differed 
from  Dr.  Johnson.  Lords  and  ladies,  re- 
marked that  high  authority,  don't  like  hav- 
ing their  mouths  shut.  Gibbon  never  shut 
anybody's  mouth,  and  in  Johnson's  pres- 
ence rarely  opened  his  own.  Johnson's 
dislike  of  Gibbon  does  not  seem  to  have 
been  based  upon  his  heterodoxy,  but  his 
ugliness.  '  He  is  such  an  amazing  ugly 
'  fellow,'  said  that  Adonis.  Boswell  follows 
suit,  and,  with  still  less  claim  to  be  critical, 
complains  loudly  of  Gibbon's  ugliness.  He 
also  hated  him  very  sincerely.  '  The  fellow 
'poisons  the  whole  club  to  me,'  he  cries.  I 
feel  sorry  for  Boswell,  who  has  deserved 
well  of  the  human  race.  Ironical  people 
like  Gibbon  are  rarely  tolerant  of  brilliant 
folly.  Gibbon,  no  doubt,  was  ugly.  We 
get  a  glance  at  him  in  one  of  Horace 
Walpole's  letters,  which,  sparkling  as  it 
does  with  vanity,  spite,  and  humour,  is 
always  pleasant.  He  is  writing  to  Mr. 
Mason : 

'You  will  be  diverted  to  hear  that  Mr. 
'Gibbon  has  quarrelled  with  me.  He  lent 
'me  his  second  volume  in  the  middle  of 


EDWARD    GIBBON  73 

'  November ;  I  returned  it  with  a  most  civil 
'panegyric.  He  came  for  more  incense. 
'  I  gave  it,  but,  alas !  with  too  much  sin- 
'  cerity ;  I  added  :  "  Mr.  Gibbon,  I  am  sorry 
*  "yott  should  have  pitched  on  so  disgust- 
'"ing  a  subject  as  the  Constantinopolitan 
'  "  history.  There  is  so  much  of  the  Arians 
* "  and  Eunomians  and  semi-Pelagians  ;  and 
'  "there is  such  a  strange  contrast  between 
' "  Roman  and  Gothic  manners,  that,  though 
'  "  you  have  written  the  story  as  well  as  it 
' "  could  be  written,  I  fear  few  will  have 
'"patience  to  read  it."  He  coloured,  all 
'his  round  features  squeezed  themselves 
'into  sharp  angles.;  he  screwed  up  his  but- 
'  ton-mouth,  and  rapping  his  snuff-box,  said, 
'  "  It  had  never  been  put  together  before  " 
'  —  so  well  he  meant  to  add,  but  gulped  it. 
'  He  meant  so  well,  certainly,  for  Tillemont, 
'  whom  he  quotes  in  every  page,  has  done 
'the  very  thing.  Well,  from  that  hour  to 
'this,  I  have  never  seen  him,  though  he 
'  used  to  call  once  or  twice  a  week ;  nor 
'has  he  sent  me  the  third  volume,  as  he 
'promised.  I  well  knew  his  vanity,  even 
'  about  his  ridiculous  face  and  person,  but 
'  thought  he  had  too  much  sense  to  avow 


74  EDWARD   GIBBON 

1  it  so  palpably.'  '  So  much,'  adds  Walpole, 
with  sublime  nescience  of  the  verdict  of 
posterity  upon  his  own  most  amusing  self, 
'  so  much  for  literature  and  its  fops.' 

Male  ugliness  is  an  endearing  quality, 
and  in  a  man  of  great  talents  it  assists  his 
reputation.  It  mollifies  our  inferiority  to 
be  able  to  add  to  our  honest  admiration  of 
anyone's  great  intellectual  merit,  '  But  did 
you  ever  see  such  a  chin  ! ' 

Nobody  except  Johnson,  who  was  mor- 
bid on  the  subject  of  looks,  liked  Gibbon 
the  less  for  having  a  button-mouth  and  a 
ridiculous  nose.  He  was,  Johnson  and  Bos- 
well  apart,  a  popular  member  of  the  club. 
Sir  Joshua  and  he  were,  in  particular,  great 
cronies,  and  went  about  to  all  kinds  of 
places,  and  mixed  in  every  sort  of  society. 
In  May,  June,  and  July,  1779,  Gibbon  sat 
for  his  picture  —  that  famous  portrait  to  be 
found  at  the  beginning  of  every  edition  of 
the  History.  Sir  Joshua  notes  in  his  Diary : 
'  No  new  sitters  —  hard  at  work  repainting 
'the  "Nativity,"  and  busy  with  sittings  of 
'  Gibbon.' 

If  we  are  to  believe  contemporary  gos- 
sip, this  was  not  the  first  time  Reynolds 


EDWARD    GIBBON  75 

had  depicted  the  historian.  Some  years 
earlier  the  great  painter  had  executed  a 
celebrated  portrait  of  Dr.  Beattie,  still 
pleasingly  remembered  by  the  lovers  of 
old-fashioned  poetry  as  the  poet  of  The 
Minstrel,  but  who,  in  1773,  was  better 
known  as  the  author  of  an  Essay  on 
Truth.  This  personage,  who  in  later  life, 
it  is  melancholy  to  relate,  took  to  drink- 
ing, is  represented  in  Reynolds's  picture  in 
his  Oxford  gown  of  Doctor  of  Laws,  with 
his  famous  essay  under  his  arm,  while  be- 
side him  is  Truth,  habited  as  an  angel, 
holding  in  one  hand  a  pair  of  scales,  and 
with  the  other  thrusting  down  three  fright- 
ful figures  emblematic  of  Sophistry,  Scep- 
ticism, and  Infidelity.  That  Voltaire  and 
Hume  stood  for  two  of  these  figures  was 
no  secret,  but  it  was  whispered  Gibbon 
was  the  third.  Even  if  so,  an  incident  so 
trifling  was  not  likely  to  ruffle  the  compos- 
ure, or  prevent  the  intimacy,  of  two  such 
good-tempered  men  as  Reynolds  and  Gib- 
bon. The  latter  was  immensely  proud  of 
Reynolds's  portrait — the  authorised  por- 
trait, of  course  —  the  one  for  which  he 
had  paid.  He  had  it  hanging  up  in  his 


76  EDWAKD    GIBBON 

library  at  Lausanne,  and,  if  we  may  be- 
lieve Charles  Fox,  was  fonder  of  looking 
at  it  than  out  of  the  window  upon  that 
incomparable  landscape,  with  indifference 
to  which  he  had  twitted  St.  Bernard. 

But,  as  I  have  said,  Gibbon  was  a  man 
of  fashion  as  well  as  a  man  of  letters.  In 
another  volume  of  Walpole  we  have  a 
glimpse  of  him  playing  a  rubber  of  whist. 
His  opponents  were  Horace  himself,  and 
Lady  Beck.  His  partner  was  a  lady  whom 
Walpole  irreverently  calls  the  Archbishop- 
ess  of  Canterbury.1  At  Brooks's,  White's, 
and  Boodle's,  Gibbon  was  a  prime  favour- 
ite. His  quiet  manner,  ironical  humour, 
and  perpetual  good  temper  made  him 
excellent  company.  He  is,  indeed,  re- 
ported once,  at  Brooks's,  to  have  expressed 
a  desire  to  see  the  heads  of  Lord  North 
and  half  a  dozen  ministers  on  the  table ; 
but  as  this  was  only  a  few  days  before  he 
accepted  a  seat  at  the  Board  of  Trade  at 
their  hands,  his  wrath  was  evidently  of 

1  By  which  title  he  refers  to  Mrs.  Cornwallis,  a  lively 
lady  who  used  to  get  her  right  reverend  lord,  himself  a 
capital  hand  at  whist,  into  great  trouble  by  persisting  in 
giving  routs  on  Sunday. 


EDWARD    GIBBON  77 

the  kind  that  does  not  allow  the  sun  to  go 
down  upon  it.  His  moods  were  usually 
mild : 

'  Soon  as  to  Brooks's  thence  thy  footsteps  bend, 
What  gratulations  thy  approach  attend ! 
See  Gibbon  rap  his  box,  auspicious  sign 
That  classic  wit  and  compliment  combine.' 

To  praise  Gibbon  heartily,  you  must 
speak  in  low  tones.  'His  cheek,'  says 
Mr.  Morison,  '  rarely  flushes  in  enthusiasm 
'for  a  good  cause.'  He  was,  indeed,  not 
obviously  on  the  side  of  the  angels.  But 
he  was  a  dutiful  son  to  a  trying  father,  an 
affectionate  and  thoughtful  stepson  to  a 
stepmother  who  survived  him,  and  the 
most  faithful  and  warm-hearted  of  friends. 
In  this  article  of  friendship  he  not  only 
approaches,  but  reaches,  the  romantic. 
While  in  his  teens  he  made  friends  with 
a  Swiss  of  his  own  age.  A  quarter  of  a 
century  later  on,  we  find  the  boyish  com- 
panions chumming  together,  under  the 
same  roof  at  Lausanne,  and  delighting 
in  each  other's  society.  His  attachment 
to  Lord  Sheffield  is  a  beautiful  thing.  It 
is  impossible  to  read  Gibbon's  letters  with- 
out responding  to  the  feeling  which  breathes 


78  EDWARD   GIBBON 

through  Lord  Sheffield's  preface  to  the  mis- 
cellaneous writings : 

'  The  letters  will  prove  how  pleasant, 
'  friendly,  and  amiable  Mr.  Gibbon  was  in 
'  private  life ;  and  if  in  publishing  letters 
'  so  flattering  to  myself  I  incur  the  imputa- 
'  tion  of  vanity,  I  meet  the  charge  with  a 
'  frank  confession  that  I  am  indeed  highly 
'  vain  of  having  enjoyed  for  so  many  years 
'  the  esteem,  the  confidence,  and  the  affec- 
'  tion  of  a  man  whose  social  qualities  en- 
'  deared  him  to  the  most  accomplished 
'  society,  whose  talents,  great  as  they  were, 
'  must  be  acknowledged  to  have  been  fully 
'  equalled  by  the  sincerity  of  his  friendship.' 

To  have  been  pleasant,  friendly,  amiable 
and  sincere  in  friendship,  to  have  written 
the  Decline  and  Fall  of  the  Roman  Empire, 
and  the  Autobiography,  must  be  Gibbon's 
excuse  for  his  unflushing  cheek. 

To  praise  Gibbon  is  not  wholly  super- 
fluous ;  to  commend  his  history  would  be 
so.  In  May,  1888,  it  attained,  as  a  whole, 
its  hundredth  year.  Time  has  not  told 
upon  it.  It  stands  unaltered,  and  with  its 
authority  unimpaired.  It  would  be  in- 
vidious to  name  the  histories  it  has  seen 


EDWARD   GIBBON  79 

born  and  die.  Its  shortcomings  have  been 
pointed  out  —  it  is  well ;  its  inequalities 
exposed  —  that  is  fair;  its  style  criticised 
— that  is  just.  But  it  is  still  read.  '  What- 
'  ever  else  is  read,'  says  Professor  Freeman, 
*  Gibbon  must  be.' 

The  tone  he  thought  fit  to  adopt  towards 
Christianity  was,  quite  apart  from  all  par- 
ticular considerations,  a  mistaken  one.  No 
man  is  big  enough  to  speak  slightingly  of 
the  constructions  his  fellow-men  have  from 
time  to  time  put  upon  the  Infinite.  And 
conduct  which  in  a  philosopher  is  ill-judged, 
is  in  an  historian  ridiculous.  Gibbon's 
sneers  could  not  alter  the  fact  that  his 
History,  which  he  elected  to  style  the 
Decline  and  Fall  of  the  Roman  Empire, 
might  equally  well,  as  Dean  Stanley  has 
observed,  have  been  called  the  '  Rise  and 
Progress  of  the  Christian  Church.'  This 
tone  of  Gibbon's  was  the  more  unfortunate 
because  he  was  not  of  those  men  who  are 
by  the  order  of  their  minds  incapable  of 
theology.  He  was  an  admirable  theolo- 
gian, and,  even  as  it  is,  we  have  Cardinal 
Newman's  authority  for  the  assertion, 
that  Gibbon  is  the  only  Church  historian 


8O  EDWARD   GIBBON 

worthy  of  the  name  who  has  written  in 
English. 

Gibbon's  love  of  the  unseemly  may  also 
be  deprecated.  His  is  not  the  boisterous 
impropriety  which  may  sometimes  be  ob- 
served staggering  across  the  pages  of  Mr. 
Carlyle,  but  the  more  offensive  variety 
which  is  overheard  sniggering  in  the  notes. 

The  importance,  the  final  value,  of  Gib- 
bon's History  has  been  assailed  in  high 
quarters.  Coleridge,  in  a  well-known  pas- 
sage in  his  Table  Talk — too  long  to  be 
quoted  —  said  Gibbon  was  a  man  of  im- 
mense reading;  but  he  had  no  philoso- 
phy. '  I  protest,'  he  adds,  '  I  do  not  re- 
'  member  a  single  philosophical  attempt 
'  made  throughout  the  work  to  fathom  the 
'  ultimate  causes  of  the  decline  and  fall  of 
'the  empire.'  This  spoiled  Gibbon  for 
Coleridge,  who  has  told  us  that  'though 
*  he  had  read  all  the  famous  histories,  and 
'  he  believed  some  history  of  every  country 
'  or  nation,  that  is  or  ever  existed,  he  had 
'never  done  so  for  the  story  itself  —  the 
'only  thing  interesting  to  him  being  the 
'principles  to  be  evolved  from  and  illus- 
'trated  by  the  facts.' 


EDWARD    GIBBON  8 1 

I  am  not  going  to  insult  the  majestic 
though  thickly-veiled  figure  of  the  Philoso- 
phy of  History.  Every  sensible  man, 
though  he  might  blush  to  be  called  a  phi- 
losopher, must  wish  to  be  the  wiser  for  his 
reading ;  but  it  may,  I  think,  be  fairly  said 
that  the  first  business  of  an  historian  is  to 
tell  his  story,  nobly  and  splendidly,  with 
vivacity  and  vigour.  Then  I  do  not  see 
why  we  children  of  a  larger  growth  may 
not  be  interested  in  the  annals  of  mankind 
simply  as  a  story,  without  worrying  every 
moment  to  evolve  principles  from  each 
part  of  it.  If  I  choose  to  be  interested 
in  the  colour  of  Mary  Queen  of  Scots' 
eyes,  or  the  authorship  of  the  Letters  of 
Junius,  I  clairn  the  right  to  be  so.  Of 
course,  if  I  imagine  either  of  these  sub- 
jects to  be  matters  of  importance — if  I 
devote  my  life  to  their  elucidation,  if  I 
bore  my  friends  with  presentation  pam- 
phlets about  them  —  why,  then,  I  am 
either  a  feeble  fribble  or  an  industrious 
fool ;  but  if  I  do  none  of  these  things  I 
ought  to  be  left  in  peace,  and  not  ridiculed 
by  those  who  seem  to  regard  the  noble 
stream  of  events  much  as  Brindley  did 


82  EDWAKD   GIBBON 

rivers  —  mainly  as  something  which  fills 
their  ugly  canals  of  dreary  and  frequently 
false  comment. 

But,  thirdly,  whilst  yielding  the  first 
place  to  philosophy,  divine  philosophy,  as 
I  suppose,  when  one  comes  to  die,  one  will 
be  glad  to  have  done,  it  is  .desirable  that 
the  text  and  the  comment  should  be  kept 
separate  and  apart.  The  historian  who 
loads  his  frail  craft  with  that  perilous 
and  shifting  freight,  philosophy,  adds  im- 
mensely to  the  dangers  of  his  voyage 
across  the  ocean  of  Time.  Gibbon  was 
no  fool,  yet  it  is  as  certain  as  anything 
can  be,  that  had  he  put  much  of  his  phi- 
losophy into  his  history,  both  would  have 
gone  to  the  bottom  long  ago.  And  even 
better  philosophy  than  Gibbon's  would 
have  been,  is  apt  to  grow  mouldy  in  a 
quarter  of  a  century,  and  to  need  three 
new  coats  of  good  oily  rhetoric,  to  make 
it  presentable  to  each  new  generation. 

Gibbon  was  neither  a  great  thinker  nor 
a  great  man.  He  had  neither  light  nor 
warmth.  This  is  what,  doubtless,  prompted 
Sir  James  Mackintosh's  famous  exclama- 
tion, that  you  might  scoop  Gibbon's  mind 


EDWARD    GIBBON  83 

out  of  Burke's  without  missing  it.  But 
hence,  I  say,  the  fitness  of  things  that 
chained  Gibbon  to  his  library  chair,  and 
set  him  as  his  task,  to  write  the  history  of 
the  Roman  Empire,  whilst  leaving  Burke 
at  large  to  illuminate  the  problems  of  his 
own  time. 

Gibbon  avowedly  wrote  for  fame.  He 
built  his  History  meaning  it  to  last.  He 
got  ;£6,ooo  for  writing  it.  The  booksellers 
netted  ^60,000  by  printing  it.  Gibbon 
did  not  mind.  He  knew  it  would  be  the 
volumes  of  his  History,  and  not  the  bank- 
ing books  of  his  publishers,  who  no  doubt 
ran  their  trade  risks,  which  would  keep 
their  place  upon  men's  shelves.  He  did 
an  honest  piece  of  work,  and  he  has  had  a 
noble  reward.  Had  he  attempted  to  know 
the  ultimate  causes  of  the  decline  and  fall 
of  the  Roman  Empire,  he  must  have  failed, 
egregiously,  childishly.  He  abated  his  pre- 
tensions as  a  philosopher,  was  content  to 
attempt  some  picture  of  the  thing  acted 
—  of  the  great  pageant  of  history — and 
succeeded. 


WILLIAM   COWPER 

THE  large  and  weighty  family  of  Grad- 
grinds  may,  from  their  various  well-cush- 
ioned coigns  of  advantage,  give  forcible 
utterance  to  their  opinions  as  to  what  are 
the  really  important  things  in  this  life ;  but 
the  fact  remains,  distasteful  as  it  may  be 
to  those  of  us  who  accomplish  the  disci- 
plinary end  of  vexing  our  fathers'  souls  by 
other  means  than  'penning  stanzas,'  that 
the  lives  of  poets,  even  of  people  who  have 
passed  for  poets,  eclipse  in  general  and 
permanent  interest  the  lives  of  other  men. 
Whilst  above  the  sod,  these  poets  were 
often  miserable  enough.  But  charm  hangs 
over  their  graves.  The  sternest  pedestrian, 
even  he  who  is  most  bent  on  making  his 
inn  by  the  precise  path  he  has,  with  much 
study  of  the  map,  previously  prescribed  for 
himself,  will  yet  often  veer  to  the  right  or 
to  the  left,  to  visit  the  lonely  churchyard 
84 


WILLIAM  COW  PER  85 

where,  as  he  hears  by  the  way,  lie  the 
ashes  of  some  brother  of  the  tuneful  quill. 
It  may  well  be  that  this  brother's  verses 
are  not  frequently  on  our  lips.  It  is  not 
the  lot  of  every  bard  to  make  quotations. 
It  may  sometimes  happen  to  you,  as  you 
stand  mournfully  surveying  the  little  heap, 
to  rack  your  brains  unavailingly  for  so 
much  as  a  single  couplet ;  nay,  so  treach- 
erous is  memory,  the  very  title  of  his  best- 
known  poem  may,  for  the  moment,  have 
slipped  you.  But  your  heart  is  melted  all 
the  same,  and  you  feel  it  would  indeed 
have  been  a  churlish  thing  to  go  on  your 
original  way,  unmindful  of  the  fact  that 

'  In  yonder  grave  a  Druid  lies ! ' 

And  you  have  your  reward.  When  you 
have  reached  your  desired  haven,  and  are 
sitting  alone  after  dinner  in  the  coffee- 
room,  neat-handed  Phyllis  (were  you  not 
fresh  from  a  poet's  grave,  a  homelier  name 
might  have  served  her  turn)  having  admin- 
istered to  your  final  wants,  and  disappeared 
with  a  pretty  flounce,  the  ruby-coloured 
wine  the  dead  poet  loved,  the  bottled  sun- 
shine of  a  bygone  summer,  glows  the 


86  WILLIAM  COWPER 

warmer  in  your  cup  as  you  muse  over  min- 
strels now  no  more,  whether 

'  Of  mighty  poets  in  their  misery  dead,' 

or  of  such  a  one  as  he  whose  neglected 
grave  you  have  just  visited. 

It  was  a  pious  act,  you  feel,  to  visit  that 
grave.  You  commend  yourself  for  doing 
so.  As  the  night  draws  on,  this  very  sim- 
ple excursion  down  a  rutty  lane  and  across 
a  meadow,  begins  to  wear  the  hues  of  de- 
votion and  of  love ;  and  unless  you  are 
very  stern  with  yourself,  the  chances  are 
that  by  the  time  you  light  your  farthing 
dip,  and  are  proceeding  on  your  dim  and 
perilous  way  to  your  bedroom  at  the  end 
of  a  creaking  passage,  you  will  more  than 
half  believe  you  were  that  poet's  only  un- 
selfish friend,  and  that  he  died  saying  so. 

All  this  is  due  to  the  charm  of  poetry. 
Port  has  nothing  to  do  with  it.  Indeed,  as 
a  plain  matter  of  fact,  who  would  drink 
port  at  a  village  inn  ?  Nobody  feels  a  bit 
like  this  after  visiting  the  tombs  of  soldiers, 
lawyers,  statesmen,  or  divines.  These  pom- 
pous places,  viewed  through  the  haze  of 
one's  recollections  of  the  'careers'  of  the 


WILLIAM   COWPER  8/ 

men  whose  names  they  vainly  try  to  per- 
petuate, seem  but,  if  I  may  slightly  alter 
some  words  of  old  Cowley's,  '  An  ill  show 
'  after  a  sorry  sight.' 

It  would  be  quite  impossible,  to  enumer- 
ate one  half  of  the  reasons  which  make 
poets  so  interesting.  I  will  mention  one, 
and  then  pass  on  to  the  subject-matter. 
They  often  serve  to  tell  you  the  age  of 
men  and  books.  This  is  most  interesting. 
There  is  Mr.  Matthew  Arnold.  How  im- 
possible it  would  be  to  hazard  even  a  wide 
solution  of  the  problem  of  his  age,  but  for 
the  way  he  has  of  writing  about  Lord 
Byron  !  Then  we  know 

'  The  thought  of  Byron,  of  his  cry 
Stormily,  sweet,  his  Titan  agony.' 

And  again  : 

'  What  boots  it  now  that  Byron  bore, 

With  haughty  scorn  which  mocked  the  smart, 
Through  Europe  to  the  jEtolian  shore, 
The  pageant  of  his  bleeding  heart?' 

Ask  any  man  born  in  the  fifties,  or  even 
the  later  forties,  what  he  thinks  of  Byron's 
Titan  agony,  and  his  features  will  probably 
wear  a  smile.  Insist  upon  his  giving  his 
opinion  about  the  pageant  of  the  Childe's 


88  WILLIAM  COW  PER 

bleeding  heart,  and  more  likely  than  not 
he  will  laugh  outright.  But,  I  repeat,  how 
interesting  to  be  able  to  tell  the  age  of 
one  distinguished  poet  from  his  way  of 
writing  of  another ! 

So,  too,  with  books.  Miss  Austen's 
novels  are  dateless  things.  Nobody  in 
his  senses  would  speak  of  them  as  'old 
novels.'  John  Inglesant  is  an  old  novel, 
so  is  Ginxs  Baby.  But  Emma  is  quite 
new,  and,  like  a  wise  woman,  affords  few 
clues  as  to  her  age.  But  when,  taking  up 
Sense  and  Sensibility,  we  read  Marianne 
Dashwood's  account  of  her  sister's  lover— 

'  And  besides  all  this,  I  am  afraid,  mam- 
'ma,  he  has  no  real  taste.  Music  seems 
'scarcely  to  attract  him,  and  though  he 
'admires  Elinor's  drawings  very  much,  it 
'  is  not  the  admiration  of  a  person  who  can 
'understand  their  worth.  He  admires  as 
'a  lover,  and  not  as  a  connoisseur.  Oh, 
'  mamma !  how  spiritless,  how  tame  was 
'  Edward's  manner  in  reading  last  night ! 
'I  felt  for  my  sister  most  severely.  I 
'  could  hardly  keep  my  seat  to  hear  those 
'  beautiful  lines  which  have  frequently  al- 
'most  driven  me  wild,  pronounced  with 


WILLIAM   COW  PER  89 

'such  impenetrable  calmness,  such  dread- 
'  f ul  indifference  ! '  *  He  would  certainly 
'  [says  Mrs.  Dashwood]  have  done  more 
'justice  to  simple  and  elegant  prose.  I 
'thought  so,  at  the  time,  but  you  would 
'  give  him  Cowper.'  '  Nay,  mamma,  if  he 
'  is  not  to  be  animated  by  Cowper ! '  — 
when  we  read  this,  we  know  pretty  well 
when  Miss  Austen  was  born.  It  is  surely 
pleasant  to  be  reminded  of  a  time  when 
sentimental  girls  used  Cowper  as  a  test  of 
a  lover's  sensibility.  One  of  our  modern 
swains  is  no  more  likely  to  be  condemned 
as  a  Philistine  for  not  reading  The  Task 
with  unction,  than  he  is  to  be  hung  for 
sheep-stealing,  or  whipped  at  the  cart's 
tail  for  speaking  evil  of  constituted  author- 
ities ;  but  the  position  probably  still  has 
its  perils,  and  the  Marianne  Dashwoods 
of  the  hour  are  quite  capable  of  putting 
their  admirers  on  to  Rose  Mary,  or  The 
Blessed  Damosel,  and  then  flouting  their 
insensibility.  The  fact,  of  course,  is,  that 
each  generation  has  a  way  of  its  own,  and 
poets  are  interesting  because  they  are  the 
mirrors  in  which  their  generation  saw  its 
own  face ;  and  what  is  more,  they  are 


90  WILLIAM  COWPER 

magic  mirrors,  since  they  retain  the  power 
of  reflecting  the  image  long  after  what 
was  pleased  to  call  itself  the  substance 
has  disappeared  into  thin  air. 

There  is  no  more  interesting  poet  than 
Cowper,  and  hardly  one  the  area  of  whose 
influence  was  greater.  No  man,  it  is  un- 
necessary to  say,  courted  popularity  less, 
yet  he  threw  a  very  wide  net,  and  caught  a 
great  shoal  of  readers.  For  twenty  years 
after  the  publication  of  The  Task  in  1785, 
his  general  popularity  never  flagged,  and 
even  when  in  the  eyes  of  the  world  it  was 
eclipsed,  when  Cowper  became  in  the 
opinion  of  fierce  Byronians  and  moss-troop- 
ing Northerners,  'a  coddled  Pope'  and  a 
milksop,  our  great,  sober,  Puritan  middle- 
class  took  him  to  their  warm  firesides  for 
two  generations  more.  Some  amongst 
these  were  not,  it  must  be  -owned,  lovers 
of  poetry  at  all ;  they  liked  Cowper  because 
he  is  full  of  a  peculiar  kind  of  religious 
phraseology,  just  as  some  of  Burns'  coun- 
trymen love  Burns  because  he  is  full  of  a 
peculiar  kind  of  strong  drink  called  whisky. 
This  was  bad  taste ;  but  it  made  Cowper 
all  the  more  interesting,  since  he  thus  be- 


WILLIAM  COWPER  91 

came,  by  a  kind  of  compulsion,  the  favourite 
because  the  only  poet,  of  all  these  people's 
children ;  and  the  children  of  the  righteous 
do  not  wither  like  the  green  herb,  neither 
do  they  beg  their  bread  from  door  to  door, 
but  they  live  in  slated  houses  and  are 
known  to  read  at  times.  No  doubt,  by  the 
time  it  came  to  these  children's  children 
the  spell  was  broken,  and  Cowper  went 
out  of  fashion  when  Sunday  travelling  and 
play-going  came  in  again.  But  his  was  a 
long  run,  and  under  peculiar  conditions. 
Signs  and  tokens  are  now  abroad,  whereby 
the  judicious  are  beginning  to  infer  that 
there  is  a  renewed  disposition  to  read  Cow- 
per, and  to  love  him,  not  for  his  faults,  but 
for  his  great  merits,  his  observing  eye,  his 
playful  wit,  his  personal  charm. 

Hayley's  Life  of  Cowper  is  now  obsolete, 
though  since  it  is  adorned  with  vignettes  by 
Blake  it  is  prized  by  the  curious.  Hayley 
was  a  kind  friend  to  Cowper,  but  he  pos- 
sessed, in  a  highly  developed  state,  that 
aversion  to  the  actual  facts  of  a  case  which 
is  unhappily  so  characteristic  of  the  Brit- 
ish biographer.  Southey's  Life  is  horribly 
long-winded  and  stuffed  out ;  still,  like 


Q2  WILLIAM  COWPER 

Homer's  Iliad,  it  remains  the  best.  It 
was  long  excluded  from  strict  circles  be- 
cause of  its  worldly  tone,  and  also  because 
it  more  than  hinted  that  the  Rev.  John 
Newton  was  to  blame  for  his  mode  of 
treating  the  poet's  delusions.  Its  place 
was  filled  by  the  Rev.  Mr.  Grimshaw's 
Life  of  the  poet,  which  is  not  a  nice  book. 
Mr.  Benham's  recent  Life,  prefixed  to  the 
cheap  Globe  edition  of  Cowper's  Poems,  is 
marvellously  good  and  compressed.  Mr. 
Goldwin  Smith's  account  of  the  poet  in 
Mr.  Morley's  series  could  not  fail  to  be  in- 
teresting, though  it  created  in  the  minds 
of  some  readers  a  curious  sensation  of  im- 
mense distance  from  the  object  described. 
Mr.  Smith  seemed  to  discern  Cowper 
clearly  enough,  but  as  somebody  very  far 
off.  This,  however,  may  be  fancy. 

The  wise  man  will  not  trouble  the  biog- 
raphers. He  will  make  for  himself  a  short 
list  of  dates,  so  that  he  may  know  where 
he  is  at  any  particular  time,  and  then,  pok- 
ing the  fire  and  (his  author  notwithstand- 
ing) lighting  his  pipe  — 

'Oh,  pernicious  weed,  whose  scent  the  fair  annoys  — ' 


WILLIAM  COWPER  93 

he  will  read  Cowper's  letters.  There  are 
five  volumes  of  them  in  Southey's  edition. 
It  would  be  to  exaggerate  to  say  you  wish 
there  were  fifty,  but  you  are,  at  all  events, 
well  content  there  should  be  five.  In  the 
course  of  them  Cowper  will  tell  you  the 
story  of  his  own  life,  as  it  ought  to  be  told, 
as  it  alone  can  be  told,  in  the  purest  of 
English  and  with  the  sweetest  of  smiles. 
For  a  combination  of  delightful  qualities, 
Cowper's  letters  have  no  rivals.  They  are 
playful,  witty,  loving,  sensible,  ironical,  and, 
above  all,  as  easy  as  an  old  shoe.  So  easy, 
indeed,  that  after  you  have  read  half  a 
volume  or  so,  you  begin  to  think  their  merits 
have  been  exaggerated,  and  that  anybody 
could  write  letters  as  good  as  Cowper's. 
Even  so  the  man  who  never  played  billiards, 
and  who  sees  Mr.  Roberts  play  that  game, 
might  hastily  opine  that  he,  too,  could  go 
and  do  likewise. 

To  form  anything  like  a  fair  estimate  of 
Cowper,  it  is  wise  to  ignore  as  much  as 
possible  his  mental  disease,  and  always  to 
bear  in  mind  the  manner  of  man  he  natu- 
rally was.  He  belonged  essentially  to  the 
order  of  wags.  He  was,  it  is  easy  to  see, 


94  WILLIAM  COWPER 

a  lover  of  trifling  things,  elegantly  fin- 
ished. He  hated  noise,  contention,  and 
the  public  gaze,  but  society  he  ever  in- 
sisted upon. 

'  I  praise  the  Frenchman,  his  remark  was  shrewd, 
How  sweet,  how  passing  sweet,  is  solitude ! 
But  grant  me  still  a  friend  in  my  retreat, 
Whom  I  may  whisper  —  "  solitude  is  sweet."  ' 

He  loved  a  jest,  a  barrel  of  oysters,  and 
a  bottle  of  wine.  His  well-known  riddle 
on  a  kiss  is  Cowper  from  top  to  toe  : 

'  I  am  just  two  and  two  ;   I  am  warm,  I  am  cold, 
And  the  parent  of  numbers  that  cannot  be  told. 
I  am  lawful,  unlawful,  a  duty,  a  fault, 
I  am  often  sold  dear,  good  for  nothing  when  bought, 
An  extraordinary  boon,  and  a  matter  of  course, 
And  yielded  with  pleasure  when  taken  by  force.' 

Why,  it  is  a  perfect  dictionary  of  kisses  in 
six  lines! 

Had  Cowper  not  gone  mad  in  his  thirty- 
second  year,  and  been  frightened  out  of 
the  world  of  trifles,  we  should  have  had 
another  Prior,  a  wittier  Gay,  an  earlier 
Praed,  an  English  La  Fontaine.  We  do 
better  with  The  Task  and  the  Lines  to 
Mary,  but  he  had  a  light  touch. 


WILLIAM  COW  PER  95 

'  'Tis  not  that  I  design  to  rob 
Thee  of  thy  birthright,  gentle  Bob, 
For  thou  art  born  sole  heir  and  single 
Of  dear  Mat  Prior's  easy  jingle. 
Not  that  I  mean  while  thus  I  knit 
My  threadbare  sentiments  together, 
To  show  my  genius  or  my  wit, 
When  God  and  you  know  I  have  neither, 
Or  such  as  might  be  better  shown 
By  letting  poetry  alone.' 

This  lightness  of  touch,  this  love  of  tri- 
fling, never  deserted  Cowper,  not  even 
when  the  pains  of  hell  gat  hold  of  him, 
and  he  believed  himself  the  especially 
accursed  of  God.  In  1791,  when  things 
were  very  black,  we  find  him  writing  to  his 
good  Dissenting  friend,  the  Rev.  William 
Bull  ('  Charissime  Taurorum  '),  as  follows  : 
'  Homer,  I  say,  has  all  my  time,  except  a 
'  little  that  I  give  every  day  to  no  very 
'  cheering  prospects  of  futurity.  I  would  I 
'  were  a  Hottentot,  or  even  a  Dissenter,  so 
'  that  my  views  of  an  hereafter  were  more 
'  comfortable.  But  such  as  I  am,  Hope,  if 
'  it  please  God,  may  visit  even  me.  Should 
'  we  ever  meet  again,  possibly  we  may  part 
'  no  more.  Then,  if  Presbyterians  ever 
'  find  their  way  to  heaven,  you  and  I  may 


96  WILLIAM  COWPER 

'  know  each  other  in  that  better  world,  and 
'  rejoice  in  the  recital  of  the  terrible  things 
'  that  we  endured  in  this.  I  will  wager  six- 
'  pence  with  you  now,  that  when  that  day 
'  comes  you  shall  acknowledge  my  story  a 
'  more  wonderful  one  than  yours ;  only 
'  order  your  executors  to  put  sixpence  in 
'  your  mouth  when  they  bury  you,  that  you 
'  may  have  wherewithal  to  pay  me.' 

Whilst  living  in  the  Temple,  which  he 
did  for  twelve  years,  chiefly  it  would  appear 
on  his  capital,  he  associated  with  a  race  of 
men,  of  whom  report  has  reached  us,  called 
'wits.'  He  belonged  to  the  Nonsense 
Club ;  he  wrote  articles  for  magazines. 
He  went  to  balls,  to  Brighton,  to  the  play. 
He  went  once,  at  all  events,  to  the  gallery 
of  the  House  of  Commons,  where  he  wit- 
nessed an  altercation  between  a  placeman 
and  an  alderman  —  two  well-known  types 
still  in  our  midst.  The  placeman  had 
misquoted  Terence,  and  the  alderman  had 
corrected  him  ;  whereupon  the  ready  place- 
man thanked  the  worthy  alderman  for 
teaching  him  Latin,  and  volunteered  in 
exchange  to  teach  the  alderman  English. 
Cowper  must  at  this  time  have  been  a  con- 


WILLIAM  COWPER  97 

siderable  reader,  for  all  through  life  he  is 
to  be  found  quoting  his  authors,  poets,  and 
playwrights,  with  an  easy  appositeness,  all 
the  more  obviously  genuine  because  he 
had  no  books  in  the  country  to  refer  to. 
'  I  have  no  English  History,'  he  writes, 
'  except  Baker's  Chronicle,  and  that  I  bor- 
'  rowed  three  years  ago  from  Mr.  Throck- 
'morton.'  This  was  wrong,  but  Baker's 
Chronicle  (Sir  Roger  de  Coverley's  favourite 
Sunday  reading)  is  not  a  book  to  be  re- 
turned in  a  month. 

After  this  easy  fashion  Cowper  acquired 
what  never  left  him  —  the  style  and  man- 
ner of  an  accomplished  worldling. 

The  story  of  the  poet's  life  does  not 
need  telling ;  but  as  Owen  Meredith  says, 
probably  not  even  for  the  second  time, 
'  after  all,  old  things  are  best.'  Cowper 
was  born  in  the  rectory  at  Great  Berkhamp- 
stead,  in  1735.  His  mother  dying  when 
he  was  six  years  old,  he  was  despatched  to 
a  country  academy,  where  he  was  horribly 
bullied  by  one  of  the  boys,  the  reality  of 
whose  persecution  is  proved  by  one  terrible 
touch  in  his  victim's  account  of  it :  'I  had 
'  such  a  dread  of  him,  that  I  did  not  dare 


98  WILLIAM  COWPER 

'lift  my  eyes  to  his  face.  I  knew  him  best 
'  by  his  shoe-buckle.'  The  odious  brute  ! 
Cowper  goes  on  to  say  he  had  forgiven 
him,  which  I  can  believe,  but  when  he  pro- 
ceeds to  ejaculate  a  wish  to  meet  his  perse- 
cutor again  in  heaven,  doubt  creeps  in. 
When  ten  years  old  he  was  sent  to  West- 
minster, where  there  is  nothing  to  show 
that  he  was  otherwise  than  fairly  happy ; 
he  took  to  his  classics  very  kindly,  and  (so 
he  says)  excelled  in  cricket  and  football. 
This  is  evidence,  but  as  Dr.  Johnson  once 
confessed  about  the  evidence  for  the  im- 
mortality of  the  soul,  '  one  would  like 
more.'  He  was  for  some  time  in  the 
class  of  Vincent  Bourne,  who,  though 
born  in  1695,  and  a  Fellow  of  Trinity 
College,  Cambridge,  ranks  high  amongst 
the  Latin  poets.  Whether  Cowper  was 
bullied  at  Westminster  is  a  matter  of  con- 
troversy. Bourne  was  bullied.  About 
that  there  can  be  no  doubt.  Cowper  loved 
him,  and  relates  with  delight  how  on  one 
occasion  the  Duke  of  Richmond  (Burke's 
Duke,  I  suppose)  set  fire  to  the  greasy 
locks  of  this  latter-day  Catullus,  and  then, 
alarmed  at  the  spread  of  the  conflagration, 


WILLIAM  COWPER  99 

boxed  his  master's  ears  to  put  it  out.  At 
eighteen  Cowper  left  Westminster,  and 
after  doing  nothing  (at  which  he  greatly 
excelled)  for  nine  months  in  the  country, 
returned  to  town,  and  was  articled  to  an 
attorney  in  Ely  Place,  Holborn,  for  three 
years.  At  the  same  time,  being  intended 
for  the  Bar,  he  was  entered  at  the  Middle, 
though  he  subsequently  migrated  to  the 
Inner  Temple.  These  three  years  in  Ely 
Place  Cowper  fribbled  away  agreeably 
enough.  He  had  as  his  desk-companion 
Edward  Thurlow,  the  most  tremendous  of 
men.  Hard  by  Ely  Place  is  Southampton 
Row,  and  in  Southampton  Row  lived  Ash- 
ley Cowper,  the  poet's  uncle,  with  a  trio  of 
affable  daughters,  Theodora  Jane,  Harriet, 
afterwards  Lady  Hesketh,  and  a  third, 
who  became  the  wife  of  Sir  Archer  Croft. 
According  to  Cowper,  a  great  deal  of  gig- 
gling went  on  in  Southampton  Row.  He 
fell  in  love  with  Theodora,  and  Theodora 
fell  in  love  with  him.  He  wrote  her  verses 
enough  to  fill  a  volume.  She  was  called 
Delia  in  his  lays.  In  1/52,  his  articles 
having  expired,  he  took  chambers  in  the 
Temple,  and  in  1754  was  called  to  the  Bar. 


100  WILLIAM  COWPER 

Ashley  Cowper,  a  very  little  man,  who 
used  to  wear  a  white  hat  lined  with  yellow 
silk,  and  was  on  that  account  likened  by 
his  nephew  to  a  mushroom,  would  not  hear 
of  his  daughter  marrying  her  cousin ;  and 
being  a  determined  little  man,  he  had  his 
own  way,  and  the  lovers  were  parted  and 
saw  one  another  no  more.  Theodora  Cow- 
per wore  the  willow  all  the  rest  of  her  long 
life.  Her  interest  in  her  cousin  never 
abated.  Through  her  sister,  Lady  Hes- 
keth,  she  contributed  in  later  years  gener- 
ously to  his  support.  He  took  the  money 
and  knew  where  it  came  from,  but  they 
never  wrote  to  one  another,  nor  does  her 
name  ever  appear  in  Cowper's  correspond- 
ence. She  became,  so  it  is  said,  morbid 
on  the  subject  during  her  latter  days,  and 
dying  twenty-four  years  after  her  lover, 
she  bequeathed  to  a  nephew  a  mysterious 
packet  she  was  known  to  cherish.  It  was 
found  to  contain  Cowper's  love-verses. 

In  1756  Cowper's  father  died,  and  the 
poet's  patrimony  proved  to  be  a  very  small 
one.  He  was  made  a  Commissioner  of 
Bankrupts.  The  salary  was  £60  a  year. 
He  knew  one  solicitor,  but  whether  he  ever 


WILLIAM  COWPER  IOI 

had  a  brief  is  not  known.  He  lived  alone 
in  his  chambers  till  1763,  when,  under  well- 
known  circumstances,  he  went  raving  mad, 
and  attempted  to  hang  himself  in  his  bed- 
room, and  very  nearly  succeeded.  He  was 
removed  to  Dr.  Cotton's  asylum,  where  he 
remained  a  year.  This  madness,  which  in 
its  origin  had  no  more  to  do  with  religion 
than  it  had  with  the  Binomial  Theorem, 
ultimately  took  the  turn  of  believing  that 
it  was  the  will  of  God  that  he  should  kill 
himself,  and  that  as  he  had  failed  to  do  so 
he  was  damned  everlastingly.  In  this 
faith,  diversified  by  doubt,  Cowper  must  be 
said  henceforth  to  have  lived  and  died. 

On  leaving  St.  Albans,  the  poet,  in  order 
to  be  near  his  only  brother,  the  Rev.  John 
Cowper,  Fellow  of  Corpus,  Cambridge,  and 
a  most  delightful  man,  had  lodgings  in 
Huntingdon  ;  and  there,  one  eventful  Tues- 
day in  1765,  he  made  the  acquaintance  of 
Mary  Unwin.  Mrs.  Unwin's  husband,  a 
most  scandalously  non-resident  clergyman 
—  whom,  however,  Cowper  composedly 
calls  a  veritable  Parson  Adams  —  was  liv- 
ing at  this  time,  not  in  his  Norfolk  rectory 
of  Grimston,  but  contentedly  enough  in 


102  WILLIAM  COWPER 

Huntingdon,  where  he  took  pupils.  Cow- 
per  became  a  lodger  in  the  family,  which 
consisted  of  the  rector  and  his  wife,  a  son 
at  Cambridge,  and  a  daughter,  also  one 
or  two  pupils.  In  1767  Mr.  Unwin  was 
thrown  from  his  horse  and  fractured  his 
skull.  Church-reformers  pointed  out,  at 
the  time,  that  had  the  Rector  of  Grimston 
been  resident,  this  accident  could  not  have 
occurred  in  Huntingdon.  They  then  went 
on  to  say,  but  less  convincingly,  that  Mr. 
Unwin's  death  was  the  judgment  of  Heav- 
en upon  him.  Mr.  Unwin  dead,  the  poet 
and  the  widow  moved  to  Olney,  where  they 
lived  together  for  nineteen  years  in  a  tum- 
ble-down house,  and  on  very  slender  means. 
Their  attraction  to  Olney  was  in  the  fact 
that  John  Newton  was  curate-in-charge. 
Olney  was  not  an  ideal  place  by  any  means. 
Cowper  and  Mrs.  Unwin  lived  in  no  fools' 
paradise,  for  they  visited  the  poor  and  knew 
the  manner  of  their  lives.  The  inhabitants 
were  mostly  engaged  in  lace-making  and 
straw-plaiting  ;  they  were  miserably  poor, 
immoral,  and  drunken.  There  is  no  idyllic 
nonsense  in  Cowper's  poetry. 

In  1773  he  had  another  most  violent  at- 


WILLIAM  COWPER  103 

tack  of  suicidal  mania,  and  attempted  his 
life  more  than  once.  Writing  in  1786 
to  Lady  Hesketh,  Cowper  gives  her  an  ac- 
count of  his  illness,  of  which  at  the  time 
she  knew  nothing,  as  her  acquaintance  with 
her  cousin  was  not  renewed  till  1785  : 

'  Know  then,  that  in  the  year  '73,  the 
'  same  scene  that  was  acted  at  St.  Albans 
'  opened  upon  me  again  at  Olney,  only 
'  covered  with  a  still  deeper  shade  of  mel- 
'ancholy,  and  ordained  to  be  of  much 
'  longer  duration.  I  believed  that  every- 
'  body  hated  me,  and  that  Mrs.  Unwin  hated 
'  me  most  of  all ;  was  convinced  that  all 
'  my  food  was  poisoned,  together  with  ten 
'  thousand  megrims  of  the  same  stamp. 
'  Dr.  Cotton  was  consulted.  He  replied 
'  that  he  could  do  no  more  for  me  than 
'might  be  done  at  Olney,  but  recommended 
'  particular  vigilance,  lest  I  should  attempt 
'  my  life  ;  a  caution  for  which  there  was  the 
'  greatest  occasion.  At  the  same  time  that 
'  I  was  convinced  of  Mrs.  Unwin's  aversion 
'  to  me,  I  could  endure  no  other  companion. 
'The  whole  management  of  me  conse- 
'quently  devolved  upon  her,  and  a  terrible 
'  task  she  had ;  she  performed  it,  however, 


104  WILLIAM  COWPER 

'  with  a  cheerfulness  hardly  ever  equalled 
'  on  such  an  occasion,  and  I  have  often 
'  heard  her  say  that  if  ever  she  praised  God 
'  in  her  life,  it  was  when  she  found  she  was 
*  to  have  all  the  labour.  She  performed  it 
'  accordingly,  but  as  I  hinted  once  before, 
'  very  much  to  the  hurt  of  her  own  consti- 
tution.' 

Just  before  this  outbreak,  Cowper  and 
Mrs.  Unwin  had  agreed  to  marry,  but  after 
it  they  felt  the  subject  was  not  to  be  ap- 
proached, and  so  the  poor  things  spoke  of 
it  no  more.  Still,  it  was  well  they  had 
spoken  out.  '  Love  me,  and  tell  me  so,'  is 
a  wise  maxim  of  behaviour. 

Stupid  people,  themselves  leading,  one  is 
glad  to  believe,  far  duller  lives  than  Cowper 
and  Mary  Unwin,  have  been  known  to 
make  dull,  ponderous  jokes  about  this 
manage  at  Olney  —  its  country  walks,  its 
hymn  tunes,  its  religious  exercises.  But  it 
is  pleasant  to  note  how  quick  Sainte  Beuve, 
whose  three  papers  on  Cowper  are  amongst 
the  glories  of  the  Causeries  dti  Lundi,  is  to 
recognise  how  much  happiness  and  pleas- 
antness was  to  be  got  out  of  this  semi- 
monastic  life  and  close  social  relation. 


WILLIAM  COWPER  105 

Cowper  was  indeed  the  very  man  for  it. 
One  can  apply  to  him  his  own  well-known 
lines  about  the  winter  season,  and  crown 
him 

'  King  of  intimate  delights, 
Fireside  enjoyments,  homeborn  happiness.' 

No  doubt  he  went  mad  at  times.  It  was 
a  terrible  affliction.  But  how  many  men 
have  complaints  of  the  liver,  and  are  as 
cheerful  to  live  with  as  the  Black  Death, 
or  Young's  Night  Thoughts.  Cowper  had 
a  famous  constitution.  Not  even  Dr. 
James's  powder,  or  the  murderous  prac- 
tices of  the  faculty,  could  undermine  it. 
Sadness  is  not  dulness. 

'  Dear  saints,  it  is  not  sorrow,  as  I  hear, 
Nor  suffering  that  shuts  up  eye  and  ear 
To  all  which  has  delighted  them  before, 
And  lets  us  be  what  we  were  once  no  more ! 
No  !  we  may  suffer  deeply,  yet  retain 
Power  to  be  moved  and  soothed,  for  all  our  pain, 
By  what  of  old  pleased  us,  and  will  again. 
No !  'tis  the  gradual  furnace  of  the  world, 
In  whose  hot  air  our  spirits  are  upcurled 
Until  they  crumble,  or  else  grow  like  steel, 
Which  kills  in  us  the  bloom,  the  youth,  the  spring, 
Which  leaves  the  fierce  necessity  to  feel, 
But  takes  away  the  power  —  this  can  avail 
By  drying  up  our  joy  in  everything, 
To  make  our  former  pleasures  all  seem  stale.' 


106  WILLIAM  COWPER 

I  can  think  of  no  one  to  whom  these 
beautiful  lines  of  Mr.  Arnold's  are  so  ex- 
quisitely appropriate  as  to  Cowper.  Noth- 
ing could  knock  the  humanity  out  of  him. 
Solitude,  sorrow,  madness,  found  him  out, 
threw  him  down  and  tore  him,  as  did  the 
devils  their  victims  in  the  days  of  old ;  but 
when  they  left  him  for  a  season,  he  rose 
from  his  misery  as  sweet  and  as  human,  as 
interested  and  as  interesting  as  ever.  His 
descriptions  of  natural  scenery  and  coun- 
try-side doings  are  amongst  his  best  things. 
He  moralises  enough,  heaven  knows !  but 
he  keeps  his  morality  out  of  his  descrip- 
tions. This  is  rather  a  relief  after  over- 
doses of  Wordsworth's  pantheism  and 
Keats's  paganism.  Cowper's  Nature  is 
plain  county  Bucks. 

'  The  sheepfold  here 

Pours  out  its  fleecy  tenants  o'er  the  glebe. 
At  first  progressive  as  a  stream,  they  seek 
The  middle  field;  but  scattered  by  degrees, 
Each  to  his  choice,  soon  whiten  all  the  land.' 

The  man  who  wrote  that  had  his  eye 
on  the  object ;  but  lest  the  quotation  be 
thought  too  woolly  by  a  generation  which 


WILLIAM  COWPER  107 

has  a  passion  for  fine  things,  I  will  allow 
myself  another : 

'  Nor  rural  sights  alone,  but  rural  sounds, 
Exhilarate  the  spirit  and  restore 
The  tone  of  languid  nature,  mighty  winds 
That  sweep  the  skirt  of  some  far-spreading  wood 
Of  ancient  growth,  make  music  not  unlike 
The  dash  of  ocean  on  his  winding  shore 


of  rills  that  slip 

Through  the  cleft  rock,  and  chiming  as  they  fall 
Upon  loose  pebbles,  lose  themselves  at  length 
In  matted  grass,  that  with  a  livelier  green 
Betrays  the  secret  of  their  silent  course.' 

In  1781  began  the  episode  of  Lady  Aus- 
ten. That  lady  was  doing  some  small  shop- 
ping in  Olney,  in  company  with  her  sister, 
the  wife  of  a  neighbouring  clergyman,  when 
our  poet  first  beheld  her.  She  pleased  his 
eye.  Whether  in  the  words  of  one  of  his 
early  poems  he  made  free  to  comment  on 
her  shape  I  cannot  say ;  but  he  hurried 
home  and  made  Mrs.  Unwin  ask  her  to  tea. 
She  came.  Cowper  was  seized  with  a  fit 
of  shyness,  and  very  nearly  would  not  go 
into  the  room.  He  conquered  the  fit,  went 
in  and  swore  eternal  friendship.  To  the 
very  end  of  her  days  Mrs.  Unwin  addressed 


108  WILLIAM  COWPER 

the  poet,  her  true  lover  though  he  was,  as 
'Mr.  Cowper.'  In  a  week,  Lady  Austen 
and  he  were  'Sister  Ann'  and  'William' 
one  to  another.  Sister  Ann  had  a  furnished 
house  in  London.  She  gave  it  up.  She 
came  to  live  in  Olney,  next  door.  She  was 
pretty,  she  was  witty,  she  played,  she  sang. 
She  told  Cowper  the  story  of  John  Gilpin, 
she  inspired  his  Wreck  of  the  Royal  George. 
The  Task  was  written  at  her  bidding.  Day 
in  and  day  out,  Cowper  and  Lady  Austen 
and  Mrs.  Unwin  were  together.  One  turns 
instinctively  to  see  what  Sainte  Beuve  has 
to  say  about  Lady  Austen.  '  C'etait  Lady 
'Austen,  veuve  d'un  baronet.  Cette  rare 
'personne  etait  douee  des  plus  heureux 
'dons;  elle  n'etait  plus  tres-jeune  ni  dans 
'  la  fleur  de  beaute ;  elle  avait  ce  qui  est 
'  mieux,  une  puissance  d'attraction  et  d'en- 
'chantement  qui  tenait  a  la  transparence 
'de  1'ame,  une  faculte1  de  reconnaissance, 
'de  sensibilit^  e"mue  jusqu  aux  larmes  pour 
'toute  marque  de  bienveillance  dont  elle 
'e"tait  1'objet.  Tout  en  elle  exprimait  une 
'  vivacite  pure,  innocente  et  tendre.  C'etait 
'une  creature  sympathique,  et  elle  devait 
'tout-a-fait  justifier  dans  le  cas  present  ce 


WILLIAM  COW  PER  109 

'  mot  de  Bernardin  de  Saint-Pierre  :  "  II  y 
' "  a  dans  la  f emme  une  gaiete  legere  qui 
'  "dissipe  la  tristesse  de  1'homme." ' 

That  odd  personage,  Alexander  Knox, 
who  had  what  used  to  be  called  a  '  primi- 
tive,' that  is,  a  fourth-century  mind,  and  on 
whom  the  Tractarian  movement  has  been 
plausibly  grandfathered,  and  who  was  (in- 
congruously) employed  by  Lord  Castlereagh 
to  help  through  the  Act  of  Union  with  Ire- 
land, of  which  we  have  lately  heard,  but 
who  remained  all  the  time  primitively  un- 
aware that  any  corruption  was  going  on 
around  him  —  this  odd  person,  I  say,  was 
exercised  in  his  mind  about  Lady  Austen, 
of  whom  he  had  been  reading  in  Hayley's 
Life.  In  October,  1806,  he  writes  to 
Bishop  Jebb  in  a  solemn  strain  :  '  I  have 
'  rather  a  severer  idea  of  Lady  A.  than  I 
'  should  wish  to  put  into  writing  for  publi- 
'  cation.  I  almost  suspect  she  was  a  very 
'  artful  woman.  But  I  need  not  enlarge.' 
He  puts  it  rather  differently  from  Sainte 
Beuve,  but  I  dare  say  they  both  meant 
much  the  same  thing.  If  Knox  meant 
more  it  would  be  necessary  to  get  angry 
with  him.  That  Lady  Austen  fell  in  love 


110  WILLIAM  COW  PER 

with  Cowper  and  would  have  liked  to  marry 
him,  but  found  Mrs.  Unwin  in  the  way,  is 
probable  enough  ;  but  where  was  the  art- 
fulness? Poor  Cowper  was  no  catch.  The 
grandfather  of  Tractarianism  would  have 
been  better  employed  in  unmasking  the 
corruption  amongst  which  he  had  lived,  than 
in  darkly  suspecting  a  lively  lady  of  designs 
upon  a  penniless  poet,  living  in  the  utmost 
obscurity,  on  the  chanty  of  his  relatives. 

But  this  state  of  things  at  Olney  did  not 
last  very  long.  '  Of  course  not,'  cackle  a 
chorus  of  cynics.  '  It  could  not  ! '  The 
Historical  Muse,  ever  averse  to  theory,  is 
content  to  say,  'It  did  not,'  but  as  she 
writes  the  words  she  smiles.  The  episode 
began  in  1781,  it  ended  in  1784.  It  be- 
came necessary  to  part.  Cowper  may  have 
had  his  qualms,  but  he  concealed  them 
manfully  and  remained  faithful  to  Mrs. 
Unwin— •- 

'The  patient  flower 
Who  possessed  his  darker  hour.' 

Lady  Austen  flew  away,  and  afterwards, 
as  if  to  prove  her  levity  incurable,  married 
a  Frenchman.  She  died  in  1802.  English 
literature  owes  her  a  debt  of  gratitude. 


WILLIAM  COW  PER  \\\ 

Her  name  is  writ  large  over  much  that  is 
best  in  Cowper's  poetry.  Not  indeed  over 
the  very  best ;  that  bears  the  inscription 
To  Mary.  And  it  was  right  that  it  should 
be  so,  for  Mrs.  Unwin  had  to  put  up  with 
a  good  deal. 

The  Task  and  John  Gilpin  were  published 
together  in  1785,  and  some  of  Cowper's 
old  friends  (notably  Lady  Hesketh)  rallied 
round  the  now  known  poet  once  more. 
Lady  Hesketh  soon  begins  to  fill  the  chair 
vacated  by  Lady  Austen,  and  Cowper's 
letters  to  her  are  amongst  his  most  de- 
lightful. Her  visits  to  Olney  were  eagerly 
expected,  and  it  was  she  who  persuaded 
the  pair  to  leave  the  place  for  good  and  all, 
and  move  to  Weston,  which  they  did  in 
1786.  The  following  year  Cowper  went 
mad  again,  and  made  another  most  desper- 
ate attempt  upon  his  life.  Again  Mary 
Unwin  stood  by  the  poor  maniac's  side, 
and  again  she  stood  alone.  He  got  better, 
and  worked  away  at  his  translation  of 
Homer  as  hard  and  wrote  letters  as  charm- 
ing as  ever.  But  Mrs.  Unwin  was  pretty 
well  done  for.  Cowper  published  his 
Homer  by  subscription,  and  must  be  pro- 


112  WILLIAM  COWPER 

nounced  a  dab  hand  in  the  somewhat 
ignoble  art  of  collecting  subscribers.  I 
am  not  sure  that  he  could  not  have  given 
Pope  points.  Pope  had  a  great  acquain- 
tance, but  he  had  barely  six  hundred  sub- 
scribers. Cowper  scraped  together  upwards 
of  five  hundred.  As  a  beggar  he  was 
unabashed.  He  quotes  in  one  of  his  let- 
ters, and  applies  to  himself  patly  enough, 
Ranger's  observation  in  the  Suspicious 
Husband,  '  There  is  a  degree  of  assurance 
'in  you  modest  men,  that  we  impudent 
'fellows  can  never  arrive  at!'  The  Uni- 
versity of  Oxford  was,  however,  too  much 
for  him.  He  beat  her  portals  in  vain. 
She  had  but  one  answer,  'We  subscribe 
'  to  nothing.'  Cowper  was  very  angry,  and 
called  her  '  a  rich  old  vixen.'  She  did  not 
mind.  The  book  appeared  in  1791.  It 
has  many  merits,  and  remains  unread. 

The  clouds  now  gathered  heavily  over 
the  biography  of  Cowper.  Mrs.  Unwin 
had  two  paralytic  strokes,  the  old  friends 
began  to  torture  one  another.  She  was 
silent  save  when  she  was  irritable,  indiffer- 
ent except  when  exacting.  At  last,  not  a 
day  too  soon,  Lady  Hesketh  came  to  Wes- 


WILLIAM  COWPER  113 

ton.  They  were  moved  into  Norfolk  —  but 
why  prolong  the  tale  ?  Mrs.  Unwin  died 
at  East  Dereham  on  the  i/th  of  December, 
1796.  Thirty-one  years  had  gone  since 
the  poet  and  she  first  met  by  chance  in 
Huntingdon.  Cowper  himself  died  in 
April,  1800.  His  last  days  were  made  phys- 
ically comfortable  by  the  kindness  of  some 
Norfolk  cousins,  and  the  devotion  of  a 
Miss  Perowne.  But  he  died  in  wretched- 
ness and  gloom. 

The  Castaway  was  his  last  original 
poem  : 

'  I  therefore  purpose  not  or  dream 

Descanting  on  his  fate, 
To  give  the  melancholy  theme 

A  more  enduring  date; 
But  misery  still  delights  to  trace 
Its  semblance  in'another's  case.' 

Everybody  interested  in  Cowper  has  of 
course  to  make  out,  as  best  he  may,  a  pic- 
ture of  the  poet  for  his  own  use.  It  is 
curious  how  sometimes  little  scraps  of 
things  serve  to  do  this  better  than  delib- 
erate efforts.  In  1800,  the  year  of  Cow- 
per's  death,  his  relative,  a  Dr.  Johnson, 
wrote  a  letter  to  John  Newton,  sending 


114  WILLIAM  COW  PER 

good  wishes  to  the  old  gentleman,  and  to 
his  niece,  Miss  Catlett ;  and  added  :  '  Poor 
'  dear  Mr.  Cowper,  oh  that  he  were  as 
'  tolerable  as  he  was,  even  in  those  days 
'  when,  dining  at  his  house  in  Bucking- 
'  hamshire  with  you  and  that  lady,  I  could 
'  not  help  smiling  to  see  his  pleasant  face 
'  when  he  said,  "  Miss  Catlett,  shall  I  give 
'  "you  a  piece  of  cutlet  ?  "  It  was  a  very 
small  joke  indeed,  and  it  is  a  very  humble 
little  quotation,  but  for  me  it  has  long 
served,  in  the  mind's  eye,  for  a  vignette 
of  the  poet,  doomed  yet  debonnaire.  Rom- 
ney's  picture,  with  that  frightful  nightcap 
and  eyes  gleaming  with  madness,  is  a  pes- 
tilent thing  one  would  forget  if  one  could. 
Cowper's  pleasant  face  when  he  said,  '  Miss 
'  Catlett,  shall  I  give  you  a  piece  of  cutlet  ? ' 
is  a  much  more  agreeable  picture  to  find  a 
small  corner  for  in  one's  memory. 


GEORGE   BORROW 

MR.  ROBERT  Louis  STEVENSON,  in  his 
delightful  Memories  and  Portraits,  takes 
occasion  to  tell  us,  amongst  a  good  many 
other  things  of  the  sort,  that  he  has  a 
great  fancy  for  The  Bible  in  Spain,  by  Mr. 
George  Borrow.  He  has  not,  indeed,  read 
it  quite  so  often  as  he  has  Mr.  George 
Meredith's  Egoist,  but  still  he  is  very  fond 
of  it.  It  is  interesting  to  know  this,  inter- 
esting, that  is,  to  the  great  Clan  Stevenson 
who  owe  suit  and  service  to  their  liege 
lord  ;  but  so  far  as  Borrow  is  concerned, 
it  does  not  matter,  to  speak  frankly,  two 
straws.  The  author  of  Lavengro,  The 
Romany  Rye,  The  Bible  in  Spain,  and 
Wild  Wales  is  one  of  those  kings  of  lit- 
erature who  never  need  to  number  their 
tribe.  His  personality  will  always  secure 
him  an  attendant  company,  who,  when  he 
pipes,  must  dance.  A  queer  company  it 

"5 


Il6  GEORGE  BORROW 

is  too,  even  as  was  the  company  he  kept 
himself,  composed  as  it  is  of  saints  and 
sinners,  gentle  and  simple,  master  and 
man,  mistresses  and  maids  ;  of  those  who, 
learned  in  the  tongues,  have  read  every- 
thing else,  and  of  those  who  have  read 
nothing  else  and  do  not  want  to.  People 
there  are  for  whom  Borrow's  books  play 
the  same  part  as  did  horses  and  dogs  for 
the  gentleman  in  the  tall  white  hat,  whom 
David  Copperfield  met  on  the  top  of  the 
Canterbury  coach.  '  'Orses  and  dorgs,' 
said  that  gentleman,  'is  some  men's  fancy. 
'  They  are  wittles  and  drink  to  me,  lodging, 
'  wife  and  children,  reading,  writing,  and 
*  'rithmetic,  snuff,  tobacker,  and  sleep.' 

Nothing,  indeed,  is  more  disagreeable, 
even  offensive,  than  to  have  anybody 
else's  favourite  author  thrust  down  your 
throat.  '  Love  me,  love  my  dog,'  is  a 
maxim  of  behaviour  which  deserves  all  the 
odium  Charles  Lamb  has  heaped  upon  it. 
Still,  it  would  be  hard  to  go  through  life 
arm-in-arm  with  anyone  who  had  stuck  in 
the  middle  of  Guy  Mannering,  or  had  bid- 
den a  final  farewell  to  Jeannie  Deans  in 
the  barn  with  the  robbers  near  Gunnerly 


GEORGE  BORROW  1 1/ 

Hill  in  Lincolnshire.  But,  oddly  enough, 
Borrow  excites  no  such  feelings.  It  is 
quite  possible  to  live  amicably  in  the  same 
house  with  a  person  who  has  stuck  hope- 
lessly in  the  middle  of  Wild  Wales,  and 
who  braves  it  out  (what  impudence ! )  by 
the  assertion  that  the  book  is  full  of  things 
like  this  :  '  Nothing  worthy  of  commemora- 
'  tion  took  place  during  the  two  following 
'  days,  save  that  myself  and  family  took  an 
'  evening  walk  on  the  Wednesday  up  the  side 
'  of  the  Berwyn,  for  the  purpose  of  botanis- 
'  ing,  in  which  we  were  attended  by  John 
'  Jones.  There,  amongst  other  plants,  we 
'  found  a  curious  moss  which  our  good 
'  friend  said  was  called  in  Welsh  Corn 
'  Carw,  or  deer's  horn,  and  which  he  said 
'  the  deer  were  very  fond  of.  On  the 
'  Thursday  he  and  I  started  on  an  expe- 
'  dition  on  foot  to  Ruthyn,  distant  about 
'  fourteen  miles,  proposing  to  return  in 
'  the  evening.' 

The  book  is  full  of  things  like  this,  and 
must  be  pronounced  as  arrant  a  bit  of 
book-making  as  ever  was.  But  judgment 
is  not  always  followed  by  execution,  and 
a  more  mirth-provoking  error  can  hardly 


Il8  GEORGE  BORROW 

be  imagined  than  for  anyone  to  suppose 
that  the  admission  of  the  fact  —  sometimes 
doubtless  a  damaging  fact  —  namely,  book- 
making,  will  for  one  moment  shake  the 
faithful  in  their  certitude  that  Wild  Wales 
is  a  delightful  book ;  not  so  delightful,  in- 
deed, as  Lavengro,  The  Romany,  or  The 
Bible  in  Spain,  but  still  delightful  because 
issuing  from  the  same  mint  as  they,  stamped 
with  the  same  physiognomy,  and  bearing 
the  same  bewitching  inscription. 

It  is  a  mercy  the  people  we  love  do  not 
know  how  much  we  must  forgive  them. 
Oh  the  liberties  they  would  take,  the 
things  they  would  do,  were  it  to  be  re- 
vealed to  them  that  their  roots  have  gone 
far  too  deep  into  our  soil  for  us  to  disturb 
them  under  any  provocation  whatsoever! 

George  Borrow  has  to  be  forgiven  a 
great  deal.  The  Appendix  to  The  Romany 
Rye  contains  an  assault  upon  the  memory 
of  Sir  Walter  Scott,  of  which  every  word 
is  a  blow.  It  is  savage,  cruel,  unjustifi- 
able. There  is  just  enough  of  what  base 
men  call  truth  in  it,  to  make  it  one  of  the 
most  powerful  bits  of  devil's  advocacy  ever 
penned.  Had  another  than  Borrow  writ- 


GEORGE  BORROW  119 

ten  thus  of  the  good  Sir  Walter,  some 
men  would  travel  far  to  spit  upon  his 
tomb.  Quick  and  easy  would  have  been 
his  descent  to  the  Avernus  of  oblivion. 
His  books,  torn  from  the  shelf,  should 
have  long  stood  neglected  in  the  shop  of 
the  second-hand,  till  the  hour  came  for 
them  to  seek  the  stall,  where,  exposed  to 
wind  and  weather,  they  should  dolefully 
await  the  sack  of  the  paper-merchant, 
whose  holy  office  it  should  be  to  mash 
them  into  eternal  pulp.  But  what  rhodo- 
montade  is  this !  No  books  are  more,  in 
the  vile  phrase  of  the  craft,  'esteemed' 
than  Borrow's.  The  prices  demanded  for 
the  early  editions  already  impinge  upon 
the  absurd,  and  are  steadily  rising.  The 
fact  is,  there  is  no  use  blinking  it,  mankind 
cannot  afford  to  quarrel  with  George  Bor- 
row, and  will  not  do  so.  It  is  bad  enough 
what  he  did,  but  when  we  remember  that 
whatever  he  had  done,  we  must  have  for- 
given him  all  the  same,  it  is  just  possible 
to  thank  Heaven  (feebly)  that  it  was  no 
worse.  He  might  have  robbed  a  church  ! 

Borrow   is   indeed  one  of  those   lucky 
men    who,    in    Bagehot's    happy    phrase, 


120  GEORGE  BORROW 

'  keep  their  own  atmosphere,'  and  as  a  con- 
sequence, when  in  the  destined  hour  the 
born  Borrovian  —  for  men  are  born  Borro- 
vians,  not  made  —  takes  up  a  volume  of 
him,  in  ten  minutes  (unless  it  be  Wild 
Wales,  and  then  twenty  must  be  allowed) 
the  victory  is  won ;  down  tumbles  the 
standard  of  Respectability  which  through 
a  virtuous  and  perhaps  long  life  has  braved 
the  battle  and  the  breeze  ;  up  flutters  the 
lawless  pennon  of  the  Romany  Chal,  and 
away  skims  the  reader's  craft  over  seas, 
hitherto  untravelled,  in  search  of  adven- 
tures, manifold  and  marvellous,  nor  in 
vain. 

If  one  was  in  search  of  a  single  epithet 
most  properly  descriptive  of  Borrow's 
effect  upon  his  reader,  perhaps  it  would 
best  be  found  in  the  word  'contagious.' 
He  is  one  of  the  most  '  catching '  of  our 
authors.  The  most  inconsistent  of  men, 
he  compels  those  who  are  born  subject  to 
his  charm  to  share  his  inconsistencies. 
He  was  an  agent  of  the  Bible  Society, 
and  his  extraordinary  adventures  in  Spain 
were  encountered,  so  at  least  his  title-page 
would  have  us  believe,  in  an  attempt  to 


GEORGE  BORROW  121 

circulate  the  Scriptures  in  the  Peninsula. 
He  was  a  sound  Churchman,  and  would 
have  nothing  to  do  with  Dissent,  even  in 
Wild  Wales,  but  he  had  also  a  passion  for 
the  ring.  Mark  his  devastations.  It  is  as 
bad  as  the  pestilence.  A  gentle  lady,  bred 
amongst  the  Quakers,  a  hater  of  physical 
force,  with  eyes  brimful  of  mercy,  was 
lately  heard  to  say,  in  heightened  tones, 
at  a  dinner-table,  where  the  subject  of 
momentary  conversation  was  a  late  prize- 
fight :  '  Oh  !  pity  was  it  that  ever  corruption 
'should  have  crept  in  amongst  them.' 
'  Amongst  whom  ? '  inquired  her  immedi- 
ate neighbour.  'Amongst  the  bruisers  of 
'  England,'  was  the  terrific  rejoinder.  Deep 
were  her  blushes  —  and  yet  how  easy  to 
forgive  her  !  The  gentle  lady  spoke  as 
one  does  in  dreams ;  for,  you  must  know, 
she  was  born  a  Borrovian,  and  only  that 
afternoon  had  read  for  the  first  time  the 
famous  twenty-fifth  chapter  of  Lavengro  : 

'But  what  a  bold  and  vigorous  aspect 
'  pugilism  wore  at  that  time !  And  the 
'great  battle  was  just  then  coming  off; 
'  the  day  had  been  decided  upon,  and  the 
'spot  —  a  convenient  distance  from  the  old 


122  GEORGE  BORROW 

'town  (Norwich) ;  and  to  the  old  town  were 
'  now  flocking  the  bruisers  of  England,  men 
'  of  tremendous  renown.  Let  no  one  sneer 
'  at  the  bruisers  of  England  ;  what  were  the 
'gladiators  of  Rome,  or  the  bull-fighters  of 
'Spain,  in  its  palmiest  days,  compared  to 
'  England's  bruisers  ?  Pity  that  ever  cor- 
'ruption  should  have  crept  in  amongst 
'them  —  but  of  that  I  wish  not  to  talk. 
'There  they  come,  the  bruisers  from  far 
'  London,  or  from  wherever  else  they  might 
'  chance  to  be  at  the  time,  to  the  great  ren- 
'  dezvous  in  the  old  city ;  some  came  one 
'  way,  some  another  :  some  of  tip-top  repu- 
'  tation  came  with  peers  in  their  chariots, 
'for  glory  and  fame  are  such  fair  things 
'  that  even  peers  are  proud  to  have  those 
'  invested  therewith  by  their  sides  ;  others 
'  came  in  their  own  gigs,  driving  their  own 
'  bits  of  blood  ;  and  I  heard  one  say :  "  I 
'  "  have  driven  through  at  a  heat  the  whole 
' "  hundred  and  eleven  miles,  and  only 
'  "  stopped  to  bait  twice  ! "  Oh  !  the  blood 
'  horses  of  old  England !  but  they  too  have 
'  had  their  day  —  for  everything  beneath 
'  the  sun  there  is  a  season  and  a  time.  .  .  . 
'  So  the  bruisers  of  England  are  come  to 


GEORGE  BORROW  123 

'be  present  at  the  grand  fight  speedily 
'  coming  off ;  there  they  are  met  in  the 
'precincts  of  the  old  town,  near  the  field 
'of  the  chapel,  planted  with  tender  saplings 
'at  the  restoration  of  sporting  Charles, 
'which  are  now  become  venerable  elms, 
'  as  high  as  many  a  steeple  ;  there  they 
'  are  met  at  a  fitting  rendezvous,  where  a 
'retired  coachman  with  one  leg  keeps  an 
'  hotel  and  a  bowling-green.  I  think  I  now 
'  see  them  upon  the  bowling-green,  the  men 
'  of  renown,  amidst  hundreds  of  people  with 
'no  renown  at  all,  who  gaze  upon  them 
'  with  timid  wonder.  Fame,  after  all,  is  a 
'  glorious  thing,  though  it  lasts  only  for  a 
'  day.  There's  Cribb,  the  champion  of 
'  England,  and  perhaps  the  best  man  in 
'  England  —  there  he  is,  with  his  huge, 
'  massive  figure,  and  face  wonderfully  like 
'that  of  a  lion.  There  is  Belcher  the 
'younger  —  not  the  mighty  one,  who  is 
'  gone  to  his  place,  but  the  Teucer  Belcher, 
'the  most  scientific  pugilist  that  ever  en- 
'  tered  a  ring,  only  wanting  strength  to  be 
'  —  I  won't  say  what.  .  .  .  But  how  shall 
'  I  name  them  all  ?  They  were  there  by 
'  dozens,  and  all  tremendous  in  their  way. 


124  GEORGE  BORROW 

'There  was  Bulldog  Hudson  and  fearless 
'  Scroggins,  who  beat  the  conqueror  of 
'Sam  the  Jew.  There  was  Black  Rich- 
'mond  —  no,  he  was  not  there,  but  I  knew 
'him  well.  He  was  the  most  dangerous 
'of  blacks,  even  with  a  broken  thigh. 
'  There  was  Purcell,  who  could  never  con- 
*  quer  till  all  seemed  over  with  him.  There 
'  was —  what !  shall  I  name  thee  last  ?  Ay, 
'  why  not  ?  I  believe  that  thou  art  the  last 
'of  all  that  strong  family  still  above  the 
'sod,  where  may'st  thou  long  continue  — 
'  true  piece  of  English  stuff,  Tom  of  Bed- 
'ford,  sharp  as  Winter,  kind  as  Spring!' 

No  wonder  the  gentle  lady  was  undone. 
It  is  as  good  as  Homer. 

Diderot,  it  will  be  remembered,  once 
wrote  a  celebrated  eulogium  on  Richard- 
son, which  some  have  thought  exagger- 
ated, because  he  says  in  it  that,  on  the 
happening  of  certain  events,  in  themselves 
improbable,  he  would  keep  Clarissa  and 
Sir  Charles  on  the  same  shelf  with  the 
writings  of  Moses,  Homer,  Euripides,  and 
Sophocles.  Why  a  literary  man  should 
not  be  allowed  to  arrange  his  library  as  he 
chooses,  without  being  exposed  to  so  awful 


GEORGE  BORROW  12$ 

a  charge  as  that  of  exaggeration,  it  is  hard 
to  say.  But  no  doubt  the  whole  eulogium 
is  pitched  in  too  high  a  key  for  modern 
ears ;  still,  it  contains  sensible  remarks, 
amongst  them  this  one :  that  he  had  ob- 
served that  in  a  company  where  the  writ- 
ings of  Richardson  were  being  read,  either 
privately  or  aloud,  the  conversation  became 
at  once  interesting  and  animated.  Books 
cannot  be  subjected  to  a  truer  test.  Will 
they  bear  talking  about  ?  A  parcel  of 
friends  can  talk  about  Borrow's  books  for 
ever.  The  death  of  his  father,  as  told  in 
the  last  chapter  of  Lavengro.  Is  there 
anything  of  the  kind  more  affecting  in  the 
library  ?  Somebody  is  almost  sure  to  say, 
'  Yes,  the  death  of  Le  Fevre  in  Tristram 
*  Shandy.'  A  third,  who  always  (provoking 
creature)  likes  best  what  she  read  last,  will 
wax  eloquent  over  the  death  of  the  little 
princess  in  Tolstoi's  great  book.  The 
character-sketch  of  Borrow's  elder  brother, 
the  self-abnegating  artist  who  declined  to 
paint  the  portrait  of  the  Mayor  of  Nor- 
wich because  he  thought  a  friend  of  his 
could  do  it  better,  suggests  De  Quincey's 
marvellous  sketch  of  his  elder  brother. 


126  GEORGE  BORROW 

And  then,  what  about  Benedict  Moll,  Joey 
the  dog-fancier  of  Westminster,  and  that 
odious  wretch  the  London  publisher  ?  You 
had  need  to  be  a  deaf  mute  to  avoid  taking 
part  in  a  conversation  like  this.  Who  was 
Mary  Fulcher?  All  the  clocks  in  the  par- 
ish will  have  struck  midnight  before  that 
question  has  been  answered.  It  is  not  to 
take  a  gloomy  view  of  the  world  to  say 
that  there  are  few  pleasanter  things  in  it 
than  a  good  talk  about  George  Borrow. 

For  invalids  and  delicate  persons  lead- 
ing retired  lives,  there  are  no  books  like 
Borrow's.  Lassitude  and  Languor,  horrid 
hags,  simply  pick  up  their  trailing  skirts 
and  scuttle  out  of  any  room  into  which  he 
enters.  They  cannot  abide  him.  A  sin- 
gle chapter  of  Borrow  is  air  and  exercise ; 
and,  indeed,  the  exercise  is  not  always  gen- 
tle. '  I  feel,'  said  an  Invalid,  laying  down 
The  Bible  in  Spain,  as  she  spoke,  upon  the 
counterpane,  '  as  if  I  had  been  gesticulat- 
'  ing  violently  for  the  space  of  two  hours.' 
She  then  sank  into  deep  sleep,  and  is  now 
hale  and  hearty.  Miss  Martineau,  in  her 
Life  in  the  Sick  Room,  invokes  a  blessing 
upon  the  head  of  Christopher  North.  But 


GEORGE  BORROW  I2/ 

there  were  always  those  who  refused  to 
believe  in  Miss  Martineau's  illness,  and 
certainly  her  avowed  perference  for  the 
man  whom  Macaulay  in  his  wrath,  writing 
to  Napier  in  Edinburgh,  called  'your 
'grog-drinking,  cock-fighting,  cudgel-play- 
'  ing  Professor  of  Moral  Philosophy,'  is 
calculated  to  give  countenance  to  this  un- 
worthy suspicion.  It  was  an  odd  taste  for 
an  invalid  who,  whilst  craving  for  vigour, 
must  necessarily  hate  noise.  Borrow  is  a 
vigorous  writer,  Wilson  a  noisy  one.  It 
was,  however,  his  Recreations  and  not  the 
Noctes  Ambrosiana,  that  Miss  Martineau 
affected.  Still  the  Recreations  are  noisy 
too,  and  Miss  Martineau  must  find  her  best 
excuse,  and  I  am  determined  to  find  an 
excuse  for  her  —  for  did  she  not  write  the 
Feats  on  the  Fiord?  —  in  the  fact,  that 
when  she  wrote  her  Life  in  the  Sick  Room 
(a  dear  little  book  to  read  when  in  rude 
health),  Borrow  had  published  nothing  of 
note.  Had  he  done  so,  she  would  have 
been  of  my  way  of  thinking. 

How  much  of  Borrow  is  true  and  how 
much  is  false,  is  one  of  those  questions 
which  might  easily  set  all  mankind  by  the 


128  GEORGE  BORROW 

ears,  but  for  the  pleasing  circumstance 
that  it  does  not  matter  a  dump.  Few 
things  are  more  comical  than  to  hear  some 
douce  body,  unread  in  Borrow,  gravely  in- 
quiring how  far  his  word  may  be  relied 
upon.  The  sole  possible  response  takes 
the  exceptionable  shape  of  loud  peals  of 
laughter.  And  yet,  surely,  it  is  a  most 
reasonable  question,  or  query,  as  the 
Scotch  say.  So  it  is  ;  but  after  you  have 
read  your  author  you  won't  ask  it  —  you 
won't  want  to.  The  reader  can  believe 
what  he  likes,  and  as  much  as  he  likes. 
In  the  old  woman  on  London  Bridge  and 
her  convict  son,  in  the  man  in  black  (how 
unlike  Goldsmith's !),  in  the  Flaming  Tin- 
man, in  Ursula,  the  wife  of  Sylvester. 
There  is  but  one  person  in  whom  you 
must  believe,  every  hour  of  the  day  and  of 
the  night,  else  are  you  indeed  unworthy  — 
you  must  believe  in  Isopel  Berners.  A 
stranger  and  more  pathetic  figure  than  she 
is  not  to  be  seen  flitting  about  in  the  great 
shadow-dance  men  call  their  life.  Born 
and  bred  though  she  was  in  a  workhouse, 
where  she  learnt  to  read  and  sew,  fear 
God,  and  take  her  own  part,  a  nobler,  more 


GEORGE  BORROW  1 29 

lovable  woman  never  crossed  man's  path. 
Her  introduction  to  her  historian  was 
quaint.  '  Before  I  could  put  myself  on 
*  my  guard,  she  struck  me  a  blow  on  the 
'  face,  which  had  nearly  brought  me  to  the 
'ground.'  Alas,  poor  Isopel !  Borrow  re- 
turned the  blow,  a  deadlier,  fiercer  blow, 
aimed  not  at  the  face  but  at  the  heart. 
Of  their  life  in  the  Dingle  let  no  man 
speak ;  it  must  be  read  in  the  last  chap- 
ters of  Lavengro,  and  the  early  ones  of 
The  Romany  Rye,  Borrow  was  certainly 
irritating.  One  longs  to  shake  him.  He 
was  what  children  call  '  a  tease.'  He 
teased  poor  Isopel  with  his  confounded 
philology.  Whether  he  simply  made  a  mis- 
take, or  whether  the  girl  was  right  in  her 
final  surmise,  that  he  was  '  at  the  root  mad,' 
who  can  say  ?  He  offered  her  his  hand, 
but  at  too  late  a  stage  in  the  proceedings. 
Isopel  Berners  left  the  Dingle  to  go  to 
America,  and  we  hear  of  her  no  more. 
That  she  lived  to  become  a  happy  '  house- 
mother,' and  to  start  a  line  of  brave  men 
and  chaste  women,  must  be  the  prayer  of 
all  who  know  what  it  is  to  love  a  woman 
they  have  never  seen.  Of  the  strange 


130  GEORGE  BORROW 

love-making  that  went  on  in  the  Dingle 
no  idea  can  or  ought  to  be  given  save 
from  the  original. 

'  Thereupon  I  descended  into  the  Dingle. 
'  Belle  was  sitting  before  the  fire,  at  which 
'the  kettle  was  boiling.  "Were  you  wait- 
'" ing  for  me?"  I  inquired.  "Yes,"  said 
'Belle,  "I  thought  you  would  come,  and 
'"I  waited  for  you."  "That  was  very 
'  "kind,"  said  I.  "  Not  half  so  kind,"  said 
'  she,  "  as  it  was  of  you  to  get  everything 
'  "  ready  for  me  in  the  dead  of  last  night, 
'  "when  there  was  scarcely  a  chance  of  my 
'  "coming."  The  tea-things  were  brought 
'forward,  and  we  sat  down.  "  Have  you 
'"been  far?"  said  Belle.  "Merely  to 
'"that  public-house,"  said  I,  "to  which 
'"you  directed  me  on  the  second  day  of 
'  "  our  acquaintance."  "  Young  men  should 
' "  not  make  a  habit  of  visiting  public- 
'"  houses,"  said  Belle;  "they  are  bad 
'"places."  "They  may  be  so  to  some 
'"people,"  said  I,  "but  I  do  not  think  the 
'  "  worst  public-house  in  England  could  do 
'"me  any  harm."  "Perhaps  you  are  so 
' "  bad  already,"  said  Belle  with  a  smile, 
' "  that  it  would  be  impossible  to  spoil 


GEORGE  BORROW  131 

'"you."  "  How  dare  you  catch  at  my 
'"words?"  said  I;  "come,  I  will  make 
'  "  you  pay  for  doing  so  —  you  shall  have 
'"this  evening  the  longest  lesson  in 
' "  Armenian  which  I  have  yet  inflicted 
'"upon  you."  "You  may  well  say  in- 
' "  flicted,"  said  Belle,  "  but  pray  spare 
' "  me.  I  do  not  wish  to  hear  anything 
' "  about  Armenian,  especially  this  even- 
'"ing."  "Why  this  evening?"  said  I. 
'  Belle  made  no  answer.  "  I  will  not  spare 
'"you,"  said  I ;  "this  evening  I  intend  to 
' "  make  you  conjugate  an  Armenian  verb." 
'"Well,  be  it  so,"  said  Belle,  "for  this 
"'evening  you  shall  command."  "To 
'  "  command  is  hramahyel,"  said  I.  "  Ram 
'"her  ill  indeed,"  said  Belle,  "I  do  not 
'"wish  to  begin  with  that."  "No,"  said 
'  I,  "as  we  have  come  to  the  verbs  we  will 
'  "  begin  regularly  :  hramahyel  is  a  verb  of 
'  "the  second  conjugation.  We  will  begin 
'  "  with  the  first."  "  First  of  all,  tell  me," 
'  said  Belle,  "  what  a  verb  is  ?  "  "  A  part 
'  "of  speech,"  said  I,  "which,  according  to 
' "  the  dictionary,  signifies  some  action  or 
'  "  passion  ;  for  example,  '  I  command  you, 
'"'or  I  hate  you.''  "I  have  given  you 


IJ2  GEORGE  BORROW 

'"no  cause  to  hate  me,"  said  Belle,  look- 
'  ing  me  sorrowfully  in  the  face. 

' "  I  was  merely  giving  two  examples," 
'  said  I,  "  and  neither  was  directed  at  you. 
* "  In  those  examples,  to  command  and 
' "  hate  are  verbs.  Belle,  in  Armenian 
'"there  are  four  conjugations  of  verbs; 
' "  the  first  ends  in  al,  the  second  in  yel, 
'"the  third  in  oul,  and  the  fourth  in  il. 
' "  Now,  have  you  understood  me  ?  " 

'  "  I  am  afraid,  indeed,  it  will  all  end  ill," 
'said  Belle.  "Hold  your  tongue!"  said 
'  I,  "  or  you  will  make  me  lose  my  pa- 
'"tience."  "You  have  already  made  me 
'"nearly  lose  mine,"  said  Belle.  "Let  us 
'  "have  no  unprofitable  interruptions,"  said 
'I.  "The  conjugations  of  the  Armenian 
'"verbs  are  neither  so  numerous  nor  so 
'  "difficult  as  the  declensions  of  the  nouns. 
'"Hear  that  and  rejoice.  Come,  we  will 
' "  begin  with  the  verb  hntal,  a  verb  of  the 
'"first  conjugation,  which  signifies  to  re- 
'"joice.  Come  along:  hntam,  I  rejoice; 
'"hyntas,  thou  rejoicest.  Why  don't  you 
'"follow,  Belle?" 

'"I  am  sure  I  don't  rejoice,  whatever 
' "  you  may  do,"  said  Belle.  "  The  chief 


GEORGE  BORROW  133 

' "  difficulty,  Belle,"  said  I,  "  that  I  find  in 
'"teaching  you  the  Armenian  grammar 
' "  proceeds  from  your  applying  to  your- 
' "  self  and  me  every  example  I  give.  Re- 
'"joice,  in  this  instance,  is  merely  an 
' "  example  of  an  Armenian  verb  of  the 
' "  first  conjugation,  and  has  no  more  to 
'  "do  with  your  rejoicing  than  lal,  which  is 
'  "also  a  verb  of  the  first  conjugation,  and 
' "  which  signifies  to  weep,  would  have  to 
' "  do  with  your  weeping,  provided  I  made 
'"you  conjugate  it.  Come  along:  hntam, 
"'I  rejoice;  hntas,  thou  rejoicest;  hnta, 
'"he  rejoices  ;  hntamk,  we  rejoice.  Now 
'"repeat  those  words."  "I  can't  bear 
'"this  much  longer,"  said  Belle.  "Keep 
'"yourself  quiet,"  said  I.  "I  wish  to  be 
' "  gentle  with  you,  and  to  convince  you, 
' "  we  will  skip  hntal,  and  also,  for  the 
'"present,  verbs  of  the  first  conjugation, 
' "  and  proceed  to  the  second.  Belle,  I 
'  "will  now  select  for  you  to  conjugate  the 
'  "  prettiest  verb  in  Armenian,  not  only  of 
'  "  the  second,  but  also  of  all  the  four  con- 
'"jugations.  That  verb  is  siriel.  Here 
' "  is  the  present  tense :  siriem,  siries, 
' "  sire,  siriemk,  sirek,  sirien.  Come  on, 


134  GEORGE  BORROW 

'"Belle,  and  say  siriem."  Belle  hesi- 
'  tated.  "  Pray  oblige  me,  Belle,  by  say- 
'"ing  siriem."  Belle  still  appeared  to 
'hesitate.  "You  must  admit,  Belle,  that 
'"it  is  softer  than  hntam."  "It  is  so," 
'  said  Belle,  "  and  to  oblige  you  I  will  say 
'"siriem."  "Very  well  indeed,  Belle," 
'said  I,  "and  now  to  show  you  how 
'"verbs  act  upon  pronouns  in  Armenian, 
'  "  I  will  say  siriem  zkiez.  Please  to  repeat 
'"siriem  zkiez."  "Siriem  zkiez,"  said 
'  Belle ;  "  that  last  word  is  very  hard  to 
'  "  say."  "  Sorry  that  you  think  so,  Belle," 
'  said  I.  "  Now,  please  to  say  siria  zis." 
'Belle  did  so.  "Exceedingly  well,"  said 
'I.  "Now  say  girani  the  sireir  zis." 
'"Girane  the  sireir  zis,"  said  Belle.  "Cap- 
'  "  ital !  "  said  I.  "  You  have  now  said  I 
'"love  you — love  me.  Ah!  would  that 
'  "you  would  love  me ! " 

' "  And  I  have  said  all  these  things  ? " 
'said  Belle.  "Yes,"  said  I.  "You  have 
'"said  them  in  Armenian."  "I  would 
' "  have  said  them  in  no  language  that  I 
'"understood,"  said  Belle.  "And  it  was 
' "  very  wrong  of  you  to  take  advantage  of 
' "  my  ignorance,  and  make  me  say  such 


GEORGE  BORROW  135 

'  "  things ! "     "  Why  so  ?  "  said  I.     "  If  you 
'  "said  them,  I  said  them  too."  ' 

'  Was  ever  woman  in  this  humour  wooed  ? ' 

It  is,  I  believe,  the  opinion  of  the  best 
critics  that  The  Bible  in  Spain  is  Borrow's 
masterpiece.  It  very  likely  is  so.  At  the 
present  moment  I  feel  myself  even  more 
than  usually  disqualified  for  so  grave  a  con- 
sideration by  my  over-powering  delight  in 
its  dear,  deluding  title.  A  quarter  of  a 
century  ago,  in  all  decent  homes,  a  boy's 
reading  was,  by  the  stern  decree  of  his 
elders,  divided  rigorously,  though  at  the 
same  time  it  must  be  admitted  crudely, 
into  Sunday  books  and  week-day  books. 
'  What  have  you  got  there  ? '  has  before 
now  been  an  inquiry  addressed  on  a  Sun- 
day afternoon  to  some  youngster,  suspi- 
ciously engrossed  in  a  book.  '  Oh,  The 
' Bible  in  Spain,1  would  be  the  reply.  'It 
'is  written  by  a  Mr.  Borrow,  you  know,  and 
*  it  is  all  about '  —  (then  the  title-page  would 
serve  its  turn)  '  his  attempts  "  to  circulate 
' "  the  Scriptures  in  the  Peninsula  ! "  '  In- 
'deed!  Sounds  most  suitable,'  answers 
the  gulled  authority,  some  foolish  sisters'- 


136  GEORGE  BORROW 

governess  or  the  like  illiterate,  and  moves 
off.  And  then  the  happy  boy  would  wriggle 
in  his  chair,  and,  as  if  thirsting  to  taste  the 
first  fruits  of  his  wile,  hastily  seek  out  a 
streaky  page,  and  there  read,  for  perhaps 
the  hundredth  time,  the  memorable  words  : 
'  "  Good  are  the  horses  of  the  Moslems," 
'  said  my  old  friend  ;  "  where  will  you  find 
'  "  such  ?  They  will  descend  rocky  moun- 
'  "  tains  at  full  speed,  and  neither  trip  nor 
'  "fall ;  but  you  must  be  cautious  with  the 
'"horses  of  the  Moslems,  and  treat  them 
' "  with  kindness,  for  the  horses  of  the  Mos- 
' "  lems  are  proud,  and  they  like  not  being 
'  "slaves.  When  they  are  young  and  first 
' "  mounted,  jerk  not  their  mouths  with 
' "  your  bit,  for  be  sure  if  you  do,  they  will 
*  "  kill  you  ;  sooner  or  later,  you  will  perish 
'  "  beneath  their  feet.  Good  are  our  horses, 
'"and  good  our  riders.  Yea,  very  good 
' "  are  the  Moslems  at  mounting  the  horse  ; 
'  "  who  are  like  them  ?  I  once  saw  a  Frank 
'"rider  compete  with  a  Moslem  on  this 
' "  beach,  and  at  first  the  Frank  rider  had 
' "  it  all  his  own  way  and  he  passed  the 
' "  Moslem,  but  the  course  was  long,  very 
' "  long,  and  the  horse  of  the  Frank  rider, 


GEORGE  BORROW  137 

'  "  which  was  a  Frank  horse  also,  panted  ; 
' "  but  the  horse  of  the  Moslem  panted  not, 
'  "for  he  was  a  Moslem  also,  and  the  Mos- 
' "  lem  rider  at  last  gave  a  cry,  and  the 
' "  horse  sprang  forward  and  he  overtook 
'  "  the  Frank  horse,  and  then  the  Moslem 
'"rider  stood  up  in  his  saddle.  How  did 
'  "  he  stand  ?  Truly  he  stood  on  his  head, 
'  "and  these  eyes  saw  him  ;  he  stood  on  his 
'  "  head  in  the  saddle  as  he  passed  the  Frank 
* "  rider ;  and  he  cried  ha !  ha !  as  he  passed 
* "  the  Frank  rider  ;  and  the  Moslem  horse 
' "  cried  ha !  ha !  as  he  passed  the  Frank 
' "  breed,  and  the  Frank  lost  by  a  far  dis- 
'"tance.  Good  are  the  Franks,  good  their 
' "  horses  ;  but  better  are  the  Moslems,  and 
'  "better  the  horses  of  the  Moslems."  ' 

That  boy,  as  he  lay  curled  up  in  his 
chair,  doting  over  the  enchanted  page, 
knew  full  well,  else  had  he  been  no  Chris- 
tian boy,  that  it  was  not  a  Sunday  book 
which  was  making  his  eyes  start  out  of 
his  head  ;  yet,  reckless,  he  cried,  '  ha !  ha ! ' 
and  read  on,  and  as  he  read  he  blessed  the 
madcap  Borrow  for  having  called  his  ro- 
mance by  the  sober-sounding,  propitiatory 
title  of  The  Bible  in  Spain  ! 


138  GEORGE  BORROW 

'Creeds  pass,  rites  change,  no  altar  standeth  whole.' 

In  a  world  of  dust  and  ashes  it  is  a 
foolish  thing  to  prophesy  immortality,  or 
even  a  long  term  of  years,  for  any  fellow- 
mortal.  Good  luck  does  not  usually  pur- 
sue such  predictions.  England  can  boast 
few  keener,  better-qualified  critics  than 
that  admirable  woman,  Mrs.  Barbauld,  or, 
not  to  dock  her  of  her  accustomed  sizings, 
Mrs.  Anna  Laetitia  Barbauld.  And  yet 
what  do  we  find  her  saying  ?  '  The  young 
'  may  melt  into  tears  at  Julia  Mandeville, 
'and  The  Man  of  Feeling,  the  romantic 
'will  shudder  at  Udolpho,  but  those  of 
'  mature  age  who  know  what  human  nature 
'is,  will  take  up  again  and  again  Dr. 
'  Moore's  Zeluco!  One  hates  to  contradict 
a  lady  like  Mrs.  Barbauld,  or  to  speak  in 
terms  of  depreciation  of  any  work  of  Mrs. 
Radcliffe's,  whose  name  is  still  as  a  pleas- 
ant savour  in  the  nostrils  ;  therefore  I  will 
let  Udolpho  alone.  As  for  Henry  Mac- 
kenzie's Man  of  Feeling,  what  was  good 
enough  for  Sir  Walter  Scott  ought  surely 
to  be  good  enough  for  us,  most  days.  I 
am  no  longer  young,  and  cannot  therefore 
be  expected  to  melt  into  tears  at  Julia 


GEORGE  BORROW  139 

Mandemlle,  but  here  my  toleration  is  ex- 
hausted. Dr.  Moore's  Zeluco  is  too  much  ; 
maturity  has  many  ills  to  bear,  but  re- 
peated perusals  of  this  work  cannot  fairly 
be  included  amongst  them. 

Still,  though  prediction  is  to  be  avoided, 
it  is  impossible  to  feel  otherwise  than  very 
cheerful  about  George  Borrow.  His  is  a 
good  life.  Anyhow,  he  will  outlive  most 
people,  and  that  at  all  events  is  a  comfort. 


CARDINAL    NEWMAN 


THERE  are  some  men  whose  names  are 
inseparably  and  exclusively  associated  with 
movements ;  there  are  others  who  are  for 
ever  united  in  human  memories  with  places ; 
it  is  the  happy  fortune  of  the  distinguished 
man  whose  name  is  at  the  top  of  this  page 
to  be  able  to  make  good  both  titles  to  an 
estate  in  our  minds  and  hearts ;  for  whilst 
his  fierce  intellectual  energy  made  him 
the  leader  of  a  great  movement,  his  rare 
and  exquisite  tenderness  has  married  his 
name  to  a  lovely  place.  Whenever  men's 
thoughts  dwell  upon  the  revival  of  Church 
authority  in  England  and  America  during 
this  century,  they  will  recall  the  Vicar  of 
St.  Mary's,  Oxford,  who  lived  to  become  a 
Cardinal  of  Rome,  and  whenever  the  lover 
of  all  things  that  are  quiet,  and  gentle,  and 
140 


CARDINAL  NEWMAN  141 

true  in  life,  and  literature,  visits  Oxford  he 
will  find  himself  wondering  whether  snap- 
dragon still  grows  outside  the  windows  of 
the  rooms  in  Trinity,  where  once  lived  the 
author  of  the  Apologia. 

The  Rev.  John  Wesley  was  a  distin- 
guished man,  if  ever  there  was  one,  and  his 
name  is  associated  with  a  movement  cer- 
tainly as  remarkable  as,  and  a  great  deal 
more  useful  than,  the  one  connected  with 
the  name  of  Newman.  Wesley's  great 
missionary  tours  in  Devon  and  Cornwall, 
and  the  wild,  remote  parts  of  Lancashire, 
lack  no  single  element  of  sublimity.  To 
this  day  the  memories  of  those  apostolic 
journeys  are  green  and  precious,  and  a 
source  of  strength  and  joy :  the  portrait 
of  the  eager  preacher  hangs  up  in  almost 
every  miner's  cottage,  whilst  his  name  is 
pronounced  with  reverence  by  a  hundred 
thousand  lips.  '  You  seem  a  very  temperate 
'people  here,'  once  observed  a  thirsty  pedes- 
trian (who  was,  indeed,  none  other  than  the 
present  writer)  to  a  Cornish  miner,  '  how 
'  did  it  happen  ? '  He  replied  solemnly, 
raising  his  cap,  'There  came  a  man  amongst 
'  us  once,  and  his  name  was  John  Wesley.' 


142  CARDINAL  NEWMAN 

Wesley  was  an  Oxford  man,  but  he  is  not 
much  in  men's  thoughts  as  they  visit  that 
city  of  enchantment.  Why  is  this  ?  It  is 
because,  great  as  Wesley  was,  he  lacked 
charm.  As  we  read  his  diaries  and  letters, 
we  are  interested,  we  are  moved,  but  we 
are  not  pleased.  Now,  Oxford  pleases  and 
charms.  Therefore  it  is,  that  when  we 
allow  ourselves  a  day  in  her  quadrangles 
we  find  ourselves  thinking  of  Dr.  Newman, 
and  his  Trinity  snap-dragon,  and  how  the 
Rev.  William  James,  'sometime  in  the  year 
'  1823,'  taught  him  the  doctrine  of  Apos- 
tolic Succession  in  the  course  of  a  walk 
round  Christchurch  Meadow,  rather  than 
of  Wesley  and  his  prayer-meetings  at  Lin- 
coln, which  were  proclaimed  by  the  author- 
ities as  savouring  of  sedition. 

A  strong  personal  attachment  of  the  kind 
which  springs  up  from  reading  an  author, 
which  is  distilled  through  his  pages,  and 
turns  his  foibles,  even  his  follies,  into  pleas- 
ant things  we  would  not  for  the  world  have 
altered,  is  apt  to  cause  the  reader,  who  is 
thus  affected,  to  exaggerate  the  importance 
of  any  intellectual  movement  with  which 
the  author  happened  to  be  associated. 


CARDINAL  NEWMAN  143 

There  are,  I  know,  people  who  think  this 
is  notably  so  in  Dr.  Newman's  case.  Crusty 
men  are  to  be  met  with,  who  rudely  say  they 
have  heard  enough  of  the  Oxford  movement, 
and  that  the  time  is  over  for  penning  ecstatic 
paragraphs  about  Dr.  Newman's  personal 
appearance  in  the  pulpit  at  St.  Mary's.  I 
think  these  crusty  people  are  wrong.  The 
movement  was  no  doubt  an  odd  one  in 
some  of  its  aspects  —  it  wore  a  very  aca- 
demic air  indeed  ;  and  to  be  academic  is  to 
be  ridiculous,  in  the  opinion  of  many.  Our 
great  Northern  towns  lived  their  grimy 
lives  amidst  the  whirl  of  their  machinery, 
quite  indifferent  to  the  movement.  Our 
huge  Nonconformist  bodies  knew  no  more 
of  the  University  of  Oxford  in  those  days, 
than  they  did  of  the  University  of  Tubin- 
gen. This  movement  sent  no  missionaries 
to  the  miners,  and  its  tracts  were  not  of 
the  kind  that  are  served  suddenly  upon  you 
in  the  streets  like  legal  process,  but  were, 
in  fact,  bulky  treatises  stuffed  full  of  the 
dead  languages.  London,  of  course,  heard 
about  the  movement,  and,  so  far  as  she  was 
not  tickled  by  the  comicality  of  the  notion 
of  anything  really  important  happening 


144  CARDINAL  NEWMAN 

outside  her  cab-radius,  was  irritated  by  it. 
Mr.  Henry  Rogers  poked  heavy  fun  at  it 
in  the  Edinburgh  Review.  Mr.  Isaac  Tay- 
lor wrote  two  volumes  to  prove  that  ancient 
Christianity  was  a  drivelling  and  childish  su- 
perstition, and  in  the  opinion  of  some  pious 
Churchmen  succeeded  in  doing  so.  But 
for  the  most  part  people  left  the  movement 
alone,  unless  they  happened  to  be  Bishops 
or  very  clerically  connected.  '  The  bishops/ 
says  Dr.  Newman,  'began  charging  against 
'us.'  But  bishops'  charges  are  amongst  the 
many  seemingly  important  things  that  do 
not  count  in  England.  It  is  said  to  be  the 
duty  of  an  archdeacon  to  read  his  bishop's 
charge,  but  it  is  undoubted  law  that  a  man- 
damus will  not  be  granted  to  compel  him  to 
do  so. 

But  notwithstanding  this  aspect  of  the 
case,  it  was  a  genuine  thought-movement 
in  propagating  which  these  long-coated 
parsons,  with  their  dry  jokes,  strange 
smiles,  and  queer  notions  were  engaged. 
They  used  to  drive  about  the  country  in 
gigs,  from  one  parsonage  to  another,  and 
leave  their  tracts  behind  them.  They  were 
not  concerned  with  the  flocks  —  their  mes- 
sage was  to  the  shcohcrds.  As  for  the 


CARDINAL  NEWMAN  145 

Dissenters,  they  had  nothing  to  say  to 
them,  except  that  their  very  presence  in 
a  parish  was  a  plenary  argument  for  the 
necessity  of  the  movement. 

The  Tractarians  met  with  the  usual  for- 
tune of  those  who  peddle  new  ideas.  Some 
rectors  did  not  want  to  be  primitive  —  more 
did  not  know  what  it  meant ;  but  enough 
were  found  pathetically  anxious  to  read  a 
meaning  into  their  services  and  offices,  to 
make  it  plain  that  the  Tracts  really  were 
'for'  and  not  'against'  the  times. 

The  great  plot,  plan,  or  purpose,  call  it 
what  you  will,  of  the  Tractarian  movement 
was  to  make  Churchmen  believe  with  a  per- 
sonal conviction  that  the  Church  of  England 
was  not  a  mere  National  Institution,  like  the 
House  of  Commons  or  the  game  of  cricket, 
but  a  living  branch  of  that  Catholic  Church 
which  God  had  from  the  beginning,  en- 
dowed with  sacramental  gifts  and  graces, 
with  a  Priesthood  apostolically  descended, 
with  a  Creed,  precise  and  specific,  which  it 
was  the  Church's  duty  to  teach,  and  man's 
to  believe,  and  with  a  ritual  and  discipline 
to  be  practised  and  maintained,  with  daily 
piety  and  entire  submission. 


146  CARDINAL  NEWMAN 

These  were  new  ideas  in  1833.  When 
Dr.  Newman  was  ordained  in  1824,  he  has 
told  us,  he  did  not  look  on  ordination  as  a 
sacramental  rite,  nor  did  he  ascribe  to  bap- 
tism any  supernatural  virtue. 

It  cannot  be  denied  that  the  Tractarians 
had  their  work  before  them.  But  they  had 
forces  on  their  side. 

It  is  always  pleasant  to  rediscover  the 
meaning  of  words  and  forms  which  have 
been  dulled  by  long  usage.  This  is  why 
etymology  is  so  fascinating.  By  the  natural 
bent  of  our  minds  we  are  lovers  of  what- 
ever things  are  true  and  real.  We  hanker 
after  facts.  To  get  a  grip  of  reality  is  a 
pleasure  so  keen  —  most  of  our  faith  is  so 
desperate  a  '  make-believe,'  that  it  is  not  to 
be  wondered  at  that  pious  folk  should  have 
been  found  who  rejoiced  to  be  told  that 
what  they  had  been  saying  and  doing  all 
the  years  of  their  lives  really  had  a  meaning 
and  a  history  of  its  own.  One  would  have 
to  be  very  unsympathetic  not  to  perceive 
that  the  time  we  are  speaking  of  must  have 
been  a  very  happy  one  for  many  a  devout 
soul.  The  dry  bones  lived  —  formal  devo- 
tions were  turned  into  joyous  acts  of  faith 


CARDINAL  NEWMAN  147 

and  piety.  The  Church  became  a  Living 
Witness  to  the  Truth.  She  could  be  inter- 
rogated—  she  could  answer.  The  old 
calendar  was  revived,  and  Saint's  Day  fol- 
lowed Saint's  Day,  and  season  season,  in 
the  sweet  procession  of  the  Christian  Year. 
Pretty  girls  got  up  early,  made  the  sign  of 
the  Cross,  and,  un scared  by  devils,  tripped 
across  the  dewy  meadows  to  Communion. 
Grave  men  read  the  Fathers,  and  found 
themselves  at  home  in  the  Fourth  Century. 

A  great  writer  had,  so  it  appears,  all 
unconsciously 'prepared  the  way  for  this 
Neo-Catholicism.  Dr.  Newman  has  never 
forgotten  to  pay  tribute  to  Sir  Walter 
Scott. 

Sir  Walter's  work  has  proved  to  be  of  so 
permanent  a  character,  his  insight  into  all 
things  Scotch  so  deep  and  true,  and  his 
human  worth  and  excellence  so  rare  and 
noble,  that  it  has  hardly  been  worth  while 
to  remember  the  froth  and  effervescence 
he  at  first  occasioned  ;  but  that  he  did 
create  a  movement  in  the  Oxford  direction 
is  certain.  He  made  the  old  Catholic 
times  interesting.  He  was  not  indeed,  like 
the  Tractarians,  a  man  of  'primitive'  mind  ; 


148  CARDINAL  NEWMAN 

but  he  was  romantic,  and  it  all  told.  For 
this  we  have  the  evidence  not  only  of  Dr. 
Newman  (a  very  nice  observer),  but  also 
of  the  delightful,  the  bewitching,  the  never 
sufficiently-to-be-praised  George  Borrow  — 
Borrow,  the  Friend  of  Man,  at  whose  bid- 
ding lassitude  and  languor  strike  their 
tents  and  flee ;  and  health  and  spirits,  ad- 
venture and  human  comradeship,  take  up 
the  reins  of  life,  whistle  to  the  horses,  and 
away  you  go  ! 

Borrow  has  indeed,  in  the  Appendix  to 
the  Romany  Rye,  written  of  Sir  Walter 
after  a  fashion  for  which  I  hope  he  has 
been  forgiven.  A  piece  of  invective  more 
terrible,  more  ungenerous,  more  savagely 
and  exultingly  cruel,  is  nowhere  to  be 
found.  I  shudder  when  I  think  of  it.  Had 
another  written  it,  nothing  he  ever  wrote 
should  be  in  the  same  room  with  the 
Heart  of  Midlothian,  Redgauntlet,  and 
The  Antiquary.  I  am  not  going  to  get 
angry  with  George  Borrow.  I  say  at  once 
—  I  cannot  afford  it.  But  neither  am  I 
going  to  quote  from  the  Appendix.  God 
forbid !  I  can  find  elsewhere  what  will 
suit  my  purpose  just  as  well.  Readers  of 


CARDINAL  NEWMAN  149 

Lavengro  will  remember  the  Man  in 
Black.  It  is  hard  to  forget  him,  the  scan- 
dalous creature,  or  his  story  of  the  iron- 
monger's daughter  at  Birmingham  'who 
'  screeches  to  the  piano  the  Lady  of  the 
'  Lake's  hymn  to  the  Virgin  Mary,  always 
'  weeps  when  Mary  Queen  of  Scots  is  men- 
'tioned,  and  fasts  on  the  anniversary  of 
'the  death  of  that  very  wise  martyr, 
'  Charles  I.  Why,  said  the  Man  in  Black, 
*  I  would  engage  to  convert  such  an  idiot 
'to  popery  in  a  week,  were  it  worth  my 
'trouble.  O  Cavaliere  Gualtereo,  avete 
'fatto  molto  in  favore  della  Santa  Sede.' 

Another  precursor  was  Coleridge,  who 
(amongst  other  things)  called  attention  to 
the  writings  of  the  earlier  Anglican  divines 

—  some  of  whom  were  men   of  primitive 
tempers   and   Catholic    aspirations.      An- 
drews and  Laud,  Jackson,  Bull,  Hammond 
and  Thorndyke  —  sound  divines  to  a  man 

—  found  the  dust  brushed  off  them.     The 
second-hand  booksellers,  a  wily  and  obser- 
vant race,  became  alive  to  the  fact   that 
though  Paley  and  Warburton,  Horsley  and 
Hoadley,  were  not  worth  the  brown  paper 
they   came  wrapped   up   in,  seventeenth- 


150  CARDINAL  NEWMAN 

century  theology  would  bear  being  marked 
high. 

Thus  was  the  long  Polar  Winter  that  had 
befallen  Anglican  theology  broken  up,  and 
the  icebergs  began  moving  about  after  a 
haphazard  and  even  dangerous  fashion  — 
but  motion  is  always  something. 

What  has  come  to  the  Movement  ?  It 
is  hard  to  say.  Its  great  leader  has  written 
a  book  of  fascinating  interest  to  prove  that 
it  was  not  a  genuine  Anglican  movement 
at  all ;  that  it  was  foreign  to  the  National 
Church,  and  that  neither  was  its  life  de- 
rived from,  nor  was  its  course  in  the  direc- 
tion of,  the  National  Church.  But  this 
was  after  he  himself  had  joined  the  Church 
of  Rome.  Nobody,  however,  ventured  to 
contradict  him,  nor  is  this  surprising  when 
we  remember  the  profusion  of  argument 
and  imagery  with  which  he  supported  his 
case. 

A  point  was  reached,  and  then  things 
were  allowed  to  drop.  The  Church  of 
Rome  received  some  distinguished  converts 
with  her  usual  well-bred  composure,  and 
gave  them  little  things  to  do  in  their  new 
places.  The  Tracts  for  the  Times,  neatly 


CARDINAL  NEWMAN  151 

bound,  repose  on  many  shelves.  Tract 
No.  90,  that  fierce  bomb-shell  which  once 
scattered  confusion  through  clerical  circles, 
is  perhaps  the  only  bit  of  Dr.  Newman's 
writing  one  does  not,  on  thinking  of,  wish 
to  sit  down  at  once  to  re-read.  The  fact 
is  that  the  movement,  as  a  movement  with 
a  terminus  ad  quern,  was  fairly  beaten  by  a 
power  fit  to  be  matched  with  Rome  herself 
— John  Bullism.  John  Bull  could  not  be 
got  to  assume  a  Catholic  demeanour.  When 
his  judges  denied  that  the  grace  of  Baptism 
was  a  dogma  of  his  faith,  Bull,  instead  of 
behaving  as  did  the  people  of  Milan  when 
Ambrose  was  persecuted  by  an  Arian  Gov- 
ernment, was  hugely  pleased,  clapped  his 
thigh,  and  exclaimed,  through  the  mouth  of 
Lord  John  Russell,  that  the  ruling  was 
'  sure  to  give  general  satisfaction,'  as  in- 
deed it  did. 

The  work  of  the  movement  can  still  be 
seen  in  the  new  spirit  that  has  descended 
upon  the  Church  of  England  and  in  the 
general  heightening  of  Church  principles  ; 
but  the  movement  itself  is  no  longer  to  be 
seen,  or  much  of  the  temper  or  modes  of 
thought  of  the  Tractarians.  The  High 


152  CARDINAL  NEWMAN 

Church  clergyman  of  to-day  is  no  Theo- 
logian —  he  is  an  Opportunist.  The  Trac- 
tarian  took  his  stand  upon  Antiquity  —  he 
laboured  his  points,  he  was  always  ready  to 
prove  his  Rule  of  Faith  and  to  define  his 
position.  His  successor,  though  he  has 
appropriated  the  results  of  the  struggle, 
does  not  trouble  to  go  on  waging  it.  He 
is  as  a  rule  no  great  reader  —  you  may  often 
search  his  scanty  library  in  vain  for  the 
works  of  Bishop  Jackson.  Were  you  to 
ask  for  them,  it  is  quite  possible  he  would 
not  know  to  what  bishop  of  that  name  you 
were  referring.  He  is  as  hazy  about  the 
Hypostatic  Union  as  are  many  laymen 
about  the  Pragmatic  Sanction.  He  is  all 
for  the  People  and  for  rilling  his  Church. 
The  devouring  claims  of  the  Church  of 
Rome  do  not  disturb  his  peace  of  mind. 
He  thinks  it  very  rude  of  her  to  dispute 
the  validity  of  his  orders  —  but,  then, 
foreigners  are  rude !  And  so  he  goes  on 
his  hard-working  way,  with  his  high  doc- 
trines and  his  early  services,  and  has  neither 
time  nor  inclination  for  those  studies  that 
lend  support  to  his  priestly  pretensions. 
This  temper  of  mind  has  given  us  peace 


CARDINAL  NEWMAN  153 

in  our  time,  and  has  undoubtedly  promoted 
the  cause  of  Temperance  and  other  good 
works ;  but  some  day  or  another  the  old 
questions  will  have  to  be  gone  into  again, 
and  the  Anglican  claim  to  be  a  Church, 
Visible,  Continuous,  Catholic,  and  Gifted, 
investigated  —  probably  for  the  last  time. 

Cynics  may  declare  that  it  will  be  but  a 
storm  in  a  teacup  —r  a  dispute  in  which 
none  but  'women,  priests,  and  peers'  will 
be  called  upon  to  take  part  —  but  it  is  not 
an  obviously  wise  policy  to  be  totally  in- 
different to  what  other  people  are  thinking 
about  —  simply  because  your  own  thoughts 
are  running  in  other  directions. 

But  all  this  is  really  no  concern  of  mine. 
My  object  is  to  call  attention  to  Dr.  New- 
man's writings  from  a  purely  literary  point 
of  view. 

The  charm  of  Dr.  Newman's  style  nec- 
essarily baffles  description  :  as  well  might 
one  seek  to  analyse  the  fragrance  of  a 
flower,  or  to  expound  in  words  the  jumping 
of  one's  heart  when  a  beloved  friend  unex- 
pectedly enters  the  room.  It  is  hard  to 
describe  charm.  Mr.  Matthew  Arnold, 
who  is  a  poet,  gets  near  it : 


154  CARDINAL  NEWMAN 

1  And  what  but  gentleness  untired, 

And  what  but  noble  feeling  warn\ 
Wherever  seen,  howe'er  inspired, 
Is  grace,  is  charm  ? ' 

One  can  of  course  heap  on  words.  Dr.  New- 
man's style  is  pellucid,  it  is  animated,  it  is 
varied  ;  at  times  icy  cold,  it  oftener  glows 
with  a  fervent  heat ;  it  employs  as  its  obedi- 
ent and  well-trained  servant,  a  vast  vocabu- 
lary, and  it  does  so  always  with  the  ease 
of  the  educated  gentleman,  who  by  a  sure 
instinct  ever  avoids  alike  the  ugly  pedantry 
of  the  book-worm,  the  forbidding  accents 
of  the  lawyer,  and  the  stiff  conceit  of  the 
man  of  scientific  theory.  Dr.  Newman's 
sentences  sometimes  fall  upon  the  ear  like 
well-considered  and  final  judgments,  each 
word  being  weighed  and  counted  out  with 
dignity  and  precision ;  but  at  other  times 
the  demeanour  and  language  of  the  judge 
are  hastily  abandoned,  and,  substituted  for 
them,  we  encounter  the  impetuous  torrent 
—  the  captivating  rhetoric,  the  brilliant 
imagery,  the  frequent  examples,  the  repeti- 
tion of  the  same  idea  in  different  words,  of 
the  eager  and  accomplished  advocate  ad- 
dressing men  of  like  passions  with  himself. 


CARDINAL  NEWMAN  155 

Dr.  Newman  always  aims  at  effect,  and 
never  misses  it.  He  writes  as  an  orator 
speaks,  straight  at  you.  His  object  is  to  con- 
vince, and  to  convince  by  engaging  your  at- 
tention, exciting  your  interest,  enlivening 
your  fancy.  It  is  not  his  general  practice  to 
address  the  pure  reason.  He  knows  (he  well 
may)  how  little  reason  has  to  do  with  men's 
convictions.  '  I  do  not  want/  he  says,  '  to 
'  be  converted  by  a  smart  syllogism.'  In 
another  place  he  observes  :  '  The  heart  is 
'  commonly  reached  not  through  the  reason 
'  —  but  through  the  imagination  by  means 
'  of  direct  impressions,  by  the  testimony  of 
'facts  and  events,  by  history  and  by  de- 
'scription.  Persons  influence  us,  voices 
'  melt  us,  books  subdue  us,  deeds  inflame 
'us.'  I  have  elsewhere  ventured  upon  a 
comparison  between  Burke  and  Newman. 
Both  men,  despite  their  subtlety  and  learn- 
ing and  super-refinement,  their  love  of  fine 
points  and  their  splendid  capacity  for  stat- 
ing them  in  language  so  apt  as  to  make 
one's  admiration  breathless,  took  very 
broad,  common-sense,  matter-of-fact  views 
of  humanity,  and  ever  had  the  ordinary 
man  and  woman  in  mind  as  they  spoke 


156  CARDINAL  NEWMAN 

and  wrote.  Politics  and  Religion  existed 
in  their  opinion,  for  the  benefit  of  plain 
folk,  for  Richard  and  for  Jane,  or,  in  other 
words,  for  living  bundles  of  hopes  and 
fears,  doubts  and  certainties,  prejudices  and 
passions.  Anarchy  and  Atheism  are  in 
their  opinion  the  two  great  enemies  of  the 
Human  Race.  How  are  they  to  be  frus- 
trated and  confounded,  men  and  women 
being  what  they  are  ?  Dr.  Newman,  re- 
cluse though  he  is,  has  always  got  the  world 
stretched  out  before  him ;  its  unceasing 
roar  sounds  in  his  ear  as  does  the  murmur 
of  ocean  in  the  far  inland  shell.  In  one  of 
his  Catholic  Sermons,  the  sixth  of  his  Dis- 
courses to  Mixed  Congregations,  there  is  a 
gorgeous  piece  of  rhetoric  in  which  he  de- 
scribes the  people  looking  in  at  the  shop- 
windows  and  reading  advertisements  in  the 
newspapers.  Many  of  his  pages  positively 
glow  with  light  and  heat  and  colour.  One 
is  at  times  reminded  of  Fielding.  And  all 
this  comparing,  and  distinguishing,  and  il- 
lustrating, and  appealing,  and  describing, 
is  done  with  the  practised  hand  of  a  con- 
summate writer  and  orator.  He  is  as 
subtle  as  Gladstone,  and  as  moving  as  Ers- 


CARDINAL  NEWMAN  157 

kine;  but  whereas  Gladstone  is  occasion- 
ally clumsy  and  Erskine  is  frequently 
crude,  Newman  is  never  clumsy,  Newman 
is  never  crude,  but  always  graceful,  always 
mellowed. 

Humour  he  possesses  in  a  marked  de- 
gree. A  quiet  humour,  of  course,  as  befits 
his  sober  profession  and  the  gravity  of  the 
subjects  on  which  he  loves  to  discourse. 
It  is  not  the  humour  that  is  founded  on 
a  lively  sense  of  the  incongruous.  This 
kind,  though  the  most  delightful  of  all,  is 
apt,  save  in  the  hands  of  the  great  masters, 
the  men  whom  you  can  count  upon  your 
fingers,  to  wear  a  slightly  professional 
aspect.  It  happens  unexpectedly,  but  all 
the  same  we  expect  it  to  happen,  and  we 
have  got  our  laughter  ready.  Newman's 
quiet  humour  always  takes  us  unawares, 
and  is  accepted  gratefully,  partly  on  ac- 
count of  its  intrinsic  excellence,  and  partly 
because  we  are  glad  to  find  that  the 

'  Pilgrim  pale  with  Paul's  sad  girdle  bound ' 

has  room  for  mirth  in  his  heart. 

In  sarcasm  Dr.  Newman  is  pre-eminent. 
Here  his  extraordinary  powers  of  compres- 


158  CARDINAL  NEWMAN 

sion,  which  are  little  short  of  marvellous 
in  one  who  has  also  such  a  talent  for 
expansion,  come  to  his  aid  and  enable  him 
to  squeeze  into  a  couple  of  sentences, 
pleadings,  argument,  judgment,  and  execu- 
tion. Had  he  led  the  secular  life,  and 
adopted  a  Parliamentary  career,  he  would 
have  been  simply  terrific,  for  his  weapons 
of  offence  are  both  numerous  and  deadly. 
His  sentences  stab  —  his  invective  de- 
stroys. The  pompous  high-placed  inbecile 
mouthing  his  platitudes,  the  wordy  soph- 
ister  with  his  oven  full  of  half-baked 
thoughts,  the  ill-bred  rhetorician  with  his 
tawdry  aphorisms,  the  heartless  hate-pro- 
ducing satirist,  would  have  gone  down 
before  his  sword  and  spear.  But  God  was 
merciful  to  these  sinners  :  Newman  became 
a  Priest  and  they  Privy  Councillors. 

And  lastly,  all  these  striking  qualities 
and  gifts  float  about  in  a  pleasant  atmos- 
phere. As  there  are  some  days  even  in 
England  when  merely  to  go  out  and  breathe 
the  common  air  is  joy,  and  when,  in  conse- 
quence, that  grim  tyrant,  our  bosom's 
lord 

'  Sits  lightly  in  his  throne,' 


CARDINAL  NEWMAN  159 

so,  to  take  up  almost  any  one  of  Dr.  New- 
man's books,  and  they  are  happily  numer- 
ous —  between  twenty  and  thirty  volumes 
—  is  to  be  led  away  from  'evil  tongues,' 
and  the  'sneers  of  selfish  men,'  from  the 
mud  and  the  mire,  the  shoving  and  push- 
ing that  gather  and  grow  round  the  pig- 
troughs  of  life,  into  a  diviner  ether,  a  purer 
air,  and  is  to  spend  your  time  in  the  com- 
pany of  one  who,  though  he  may  some- 
times astonish,  yet  never  fails  to  make 
you  feel  (to  use  Carlyle's  words  about  a 
very  different  author),  '  that  you  have 
'passed  your  evening  well  and  nobly,  as 
'in  a  temple  of  wisdom,  not  ill  and  dis- 
'  gracefully  as  in  brawling  tavern  supper- 
'  rooms  with  fools  and  noisy  persons.' 

The  tendency  to  be  egotistical  noticeable 
in  some  persons  who  are  free  from  the 
faintest  taint  of  egotism  is  a  tendency  hard 
to  account  for  —  but  delightful  to  watch. 

'  Anything,'  says  glorious  John  Dryden, 
'  though  ever  so  little,  which  a  man  speaks 
'of  himself  —  in  my  opinion,  is  still  too 
'much.'  A  sound  opinion  most  surely, 
and  yet  how  interesting  are  the  personal 
touches  we  find  scattered  up  and  down 


I6O  CARDINAL  NEWMAN 

Dryden's  noble  prefaces.  So  with  New- 
man—  his  dignity,  his  self-restraint,  his 
taste,  are  all  the  greatest  stickler  for  a  stiff 
upper  lip  and  the  consumption  of  your  own 
smoke  could  desire,  and  yet  the  personal 
note  is  frequently  sounded.  He  is  never 
afraid  to  strike  it  when  the  perfect  har- 
mony that  exists  between  his  character 
and  his  style  demands  its  sound,  and  so  it 
has  come  about  that  we  love  what  he  has 
written  because  he  wrote  it,  and  we  love 
him  who  wrote  it  because  of  what  he  has 
written. 

I  now  approach  by  far  the  pleasantest 
part  of  my  task,  namely,  the  selection  of 
two  or  three  passages  from  Dr.  Newman's 
books  by  way  of  illustrating  what  I  have 
taken  the  liberty  to  say  are  notable  charac- 
teristics of  his  style. 

Let  me  begin  with  a  chance  specimen 
of  the  precision  of  his  language.  The  pas- 
sage is  from  the  prefatory  notice  the  Cardi- 
nal prefixed  to  the  Rev.  William  Palmer's 
Notes  of  a  Visit  to  the  Russian  Church  in 
the  Years  1840,  1841.  It  is  dated  1882, 
and  is  consequently  the  writing  of  a  man 
over  eighty  years  cf  age  :  '  William  Palmer 


CARDINAL  NEWMAN  l6l 

'  was  one  of  those  earnest-minded  and  de- 
'vout  men,  forty  years  since,  who,  deeply 
'convinced  of  the  great  truth  that  our 
'Lord  had  instituted,  and  still  acknowl- 
'  edges  and  protects,  a  Visible  Church  — 
'  one,  individual,  and  integral ;  Catholic, 
'as  spread  over  the  earth,  Apostolic,  as 
'coeval  with  the  Apostles  of  Christ,  and 
'  Holy,  as  being  the  dispenser  of  His  Word 
'and  Sacraments  —  considered  it  at  pres- 
'ent  to  exist  in  three  main  branches,  or 
'  rather  in  a  triple  presence,  the  Latin,  the 
'  Greek,  and  the  Anglican,  these  three 
'being  one  and  the  same  Church  distin- 
'  guishable  from  each  other  by  secondary, 
'fortuitous,  and  local,  though  important 
'  characteristics.  And  whereas  the  whole 
'Church  in  its  fulness  was,  as  they  be- 
'lieved,  at  once  and  severally  Anglican, 
'Greek,  and  Latin,  so  in  turn  each  one 
'of  those  three  was  the  whole  Church; 
( whence  it  followed  that,  whenever  any 
'one  of  the  three  was  present,  the  other 
'  two,  by  the  nature  of  the  case,  was  absent, 
'and  therefore  the  three  could  not  have 
'  direct  relations  with  each  other,  as  if  they 
'  were  three  substantive  bodies,  there  being 


1 62  CARDINAL  NEWMAN 

'no  real  difference  between  them  except 
'the  external  accident  of  place.  More- 
'over,  since,  as  has  been  said,  on  a  given 
'territory  there  could  not  be  more  than 
'one  of  the  three,  it  followed  that  Chris- 
'  tians  generally,  wherever  they  were,  were 
'  bound  to  recognise,  and  had  a  claim  to  be 
'  recognised  by  that  one ;  ceasing  to  belong 
'to-  the  Anglican  Church,  as  Anglican, 
'when  they  were  at  Rome,  and  ignoring 
'  Rome,  as  Rome,  when  they  found  them- 
'  selves  at  Moscow.  Lastly,  not  to  ac- 
'  knowledge  this  inevitable  outcome  of  the 
'  initial  idea  of  the  Church,  viz.,  that  it  was 
•  both  everywhere  and  one,  was  bad  logic, 
'and  to  act  in  opposition  to  it  was  nothing 
'  short  of  setting  up  altar  against  altar, 
'that  is,  the  hideous  sin  of  schism,  and  a 
'  sacrilege.  This  I  conceive  to  be  the  for- 
'mal  teaching  of  Anglicanism.' 

The  most  carefully  considered  judg- 
ments of  Lord  Westbury  or  Lord  Cairns 
may  be  searched  in  vain  for  finer  examples 
of  stern  accuracy  and  beautiful  aptness  of 
language. 

For  examples  of  what  may  be  called 
Newman's  oratorical  rush,  one  has  not  far 


CARDINAL  NEWMAN  163 

to  look  —  though  when  torn  from  their 
context  and  deprived  of  their  conclusion 
they  are  robbed  of  three-fourths  of  their 
power.  Here  is  a  passage  from  his  second 
lecture  addressed  to  the  Anglican  Party 
of  1833.  It  is  on  tne  Life  of  the  National 
Church  of  England. 

'  Doubtless  the  National  religion  is  alive. 
'  It  is  a  great  power  in  the  midst  of  us,  it 
'  wields  an  enormous  influence ;  it  re- 
'  presses  a  hundred  foes ;  it  conducts  a 
'hundred  undertakings  ;  it  attracts  men  to 
'  it,  uses  them,  rewards  them  ;  it  has  thou- 
'  sands  of  beautiful  homes  up  and  down 
'the  country  where  quiet  men  may  do  its 
*  work  and  benefit  its  people  ;  it  collects 
'  vast  sums  in  the  shape  of  voluntary  offer- 
'  ings,  and  with  them  it  builds  Churches, 
'  prints  and  distributes  innumerable  Bibles, 
'  books,  and  tracts,  and  sustains  mission- 
'aries  in  all  parts  of  the  earth.  In  all 
'  parts  of  the  earth  it  opposes  the  Catholic 
'  Church,  denounces  her  as  anti-christian, 
'bribes  the  world  against  her,  obstructs 
'her  influence,  apes  her  authority,  and 
'confuses  her  evidence.  In  all  parts  of 
'  the  world  it  is  the  religion  of  gentlemen, 


1 64  CARDINAL  NEWMAN 

'of  scholars,  of  men  of  substance,  and 
'  men  of  no  personal  faith  at  all.  If  this 
'  be  life,  if  it  be  life  to  impart  a  tone  to 
'  the  Court  and  Houses  of  Parliament,  to 
'  Ministers  of  State,  to  law  and  literature, 
'  to  universities  and  schools,  and  to  soci- 
'  ety,  if  it  be  life  to  be  a  principle  of  order 
'in  the  population,  and  an  organ  of  benev- 
'olence  and  almsgiving  towards  the  poor, 
'  if  it  be  life  to  make  men  decent,  respect- 
'able,  and  sensible,  to  embellish  and  re- 
'  form  the  family  circle,  to  deprive  vice  of 
'its  grossness  and  to  shed  a  glow  over 
'  avarice  and  ambition  ;  if,  indeed,  it  is  the 
'  life  of  religion  to  be  the  first  jewel  in  the 
'Queen's  crown,  and  the  highest  step  of 
'her  throne,  then  doubtless  the  National 
'  Church  is  replete,  it  overflows  with  life ; 
'  but  the  question  has  still  to  be  answered  : 
'  life  of  what  kind  ? ' 

For  a  delightful  example  of  Dr.  New- 
man's humour,  which  is  largely,  if  not  en- 
tirely, a  playful  humour,  I  will  remind  the 
reader  of  the  celebrated  imaginary  speech 
against  the  British  Constitution  attributed 
to  'a  member  of  the  junior  branch  of  the 
'  Potemkin  family,'  and  supposed  to  have 


CARDINAL  NEWMAN  \ 65 

been  delivered  at  Moscow  in  the  year  1850. 
It  is  too  long  for  quotation,  but  will  be 
found  in  the  first  of  the  Lectures  on  the 
Present  Position  of  Catholics  in  England. 
The  whole  book  is  one  of  the  best  hu- 
moured books  in  the  English  language. 

Of  his  sarcasm,  the  following  example, 
well-known  as  it  is,  must  be  given.  It 
occurs  in  the  Essay  on  the  Prospects  of  the 
Anglican  Church,  which  is  reprinted  from 
the  British  Critic  in  the  first  volume  of 
the  Essays  Critical  and  Historical. 

'  In  the  present  day  mistiness  is  the 
•  mother  of  wisdom.  A  man  who  can  set 
'  down  half  a  dozen  general  propositions, 
'  which  escape  from  destroying  one  another 
'  only  by  being  diluted  into  truisms,  who 
'  can  hold  the  balance  between  opposites 
'  so  skilfully  as  to  do  without  fulcrum  or 
'  beam,  who  never  enunciates  a  truth  with- 
'  out  guarding  himself  from  being  supposed 
'  to  exclude  the  contradictory,  who  holds 
'  that  Scripture  is  the  only  authority  —  yet 
'  that  the  Church  is  to  be  deferred  to,  that 
'  faith  only  justifies,  yet  that  it  does  not 
'justify  without  works,  that  grace  does  not 
'  depend  on  the  sacraments,  yet  is  not  given 


1 66  CARDINAL  NEWMAN 

'without  them,  that  bishops  are  a  divine 
'  ordinance  —  yet  those  who  have  them 
'  not  are  in  the  same  religious  condition  as 
'  those  who  have  —  this  is  your  safe  man 
'  and  the  hope  of  the  Church  ;  this  is  what 
'  the  Church  is  said  to  want,  not  party 
'  men,  but  sensible,  temperate,  sober,  well- 
'  judging  persons  to  guide  it  through  the 
*  channel  of  No-meaning,  between  the  Scylla 
'and  Charybdis  of  Aye  and  No.  But, 
'  alas  !  reading  sets  men  thinking.  They 
'  will  not  keep  standing  in  that  very  atti- 
'  tude,  which  you  please  to  call  sound 
'  Church-of-Englandism  or  orthodox  Prot- 
'  estantism.  It  tires  them,  it  is  so  very 
'  awkward,  and  for  the  life  of  them  —  they 
'  cannot  continue  in  it  long  together,  where 
'  there  is  neither  article  nor  canon  to  lean 
'  against  —  they  cannot  go  on  for  ever  stand- 
'  ing  on  one  leg,  or  sitting  without  a  chair, 
'  or  walking  with  their  legs  tied,  or  grazing 
'  like  Tityrus's  stags  on  the  air.  Promises 
'imply  conclusions — germs  lead  to  devel- 
'  opments ;  principles  have  issues;  doctrines 
'  lead  to  action.' 

Of  the  personal  note  to  which  I  have 
made    reference  —  no   examples   need   or 


CARDINAL  NEWMAN  l6/ 

should  be  given.     Such  things  must  not 
be  transplanted  from  their  own  homes. 

'  The  delicate  shells  lay  on  the  shore; 
The  bubbles  of  the  latest  wave 
Fresh  pearl  to  their  enamel  gave; 
And  the  bellowing  of  the  savage  sea 
Greeted  their  safe  escape  to  me. 
I  wiped  away  the  weeds  and  foam 
And  brought  my  sea-born  treasures  home : 
But  the  poor,  unsightly  noisome  things 
Had  left  their  beauty  on  the  shore, 
With  the  sun  and  the  sand  and  the  wild  uproar.' 

If  I  may  suppose  this  paper  read  by 
someone  who  is  not  yet  acquainted  with 
Newman's  writings  I  would  advise  him, 
unless  he  is  bent  on  theology,  to  begin  not 
with  the  Sermons,  not  even  with  the  Apolo- 
gia, but  with  the  Lectures  on  the  Present 
Position  of  Catholics  in  England.  Then 
let  him  take  up  the  Lectures  on  the  Idea 
of  an  University,  and  on  University  Siib- 
jects.  These  may  be  followed  by  Discus- 
sions and  Arguments,  after  which  he  will 
be  well  disposed  to  read  the  Lectures  on 
the  Difficulties  felt  by  Anglicans.  If  after 
he  has  despatched  these  volumes  he  is  not 
infected  with  what  one  of  those  charging 


1 68  CARDINAL  NEWMAN 

Bishops  called  '  Newmania,'  he  is  possessed 
of  a  devil  of  obtuseness  no  wit  of  man  can 
expel. 

Of  the  strength  of  Dr.  Newman's  philo- 
sophical position,  which  he  has  explained 
in  his  Grammar  of  Assent,  it  would  ill  be- 
come me  to  speak.  He  there  strikes  the 
shield  of  John  Locke.  Non  nostrum  est 
tantas  componere  lites.  But  it  is  difficult 
for  the  most  ignorant  of  us  not  to  have  shy 
notions  and  lurking  suspicions  even  about 
such  big  subjects  and  great  men.  Locke 
maintained  that  a  man's  belief  in  a  propo- 
sition really  depended  upon  and  bore  a  re- 
lation to  the  weight  of  evidence  forthcoming 
in  its  favour.  Dr.  Newman  asserts  that 
certainty  is  a  quality  of  propositions,  and 
he  has  discovered  in  man  '  an  illative  sense ' 
whereby  conclusions  are  converted  into 
dogmas  and  a  measured  concurrence  into 
an  unlimited  and  absolute  assurance.  This 
illative  sense  is  hardly  a  thing  (if  I  may  use 
an  expression  for  ever  associated  with  Lord 
Macaulay)  to  be  cocksure  about.  Wedges, 
said  the-  mediaeval  mechanic  to  his  pupils, 
split  wood  by  virtue  of  a  wood-splitting 
quality  in  wedges  —  but  now  we  are  indis- 


CARDINAL  NEWMAN  169 

posed  to  endow  wedges  with  qualities,  and 
if  not  wedges,  why  propositions  ?  But  the 
Grammar of 'Assent 'is  a  beautiful  book,  and 
with  a  quotation  from  it  I  will  close  my 
quotations  :  '  Thus  it  is  that  Christianity 
'is  the  fulfilment  of  the  promise  made  to 
'  Abraham  and  of  the  Mosaic  revelations ; 
*  this  is  how  it  has  been  able  from  the  first 
'  to  occupy  the  world,  and  gain  a  hold  on 
'  every  class  of  human  society  to  which  its 
'  preachers  reached  ;  this  is  why  the  Roman 
'  power  and  the  multitude  of  religions  which 
'  it  embraced  could  not  «tand  against  it ; 
'this  is  the  secret  of  its  sustained  energy, 
'and  its  never-flagging  martyrdoms  ;  this  is 
'  how  at  present  it  is  so  mysteriously  potent, 
'  in  spite  of  the  new  and  fearful  adversaries 
'  which  beset  its  path.  It  has  with  it  that 
'  gift  of  stanching  and  healing  the  one  deep 
'  wound  of  human  nature,  which  avails  more 
'  for  its  success  than  a  full  encyclopaedia  of 
'  scientific  knowledge  and  a  whole  library 
'  of  controversy,  and  therefore  it  must  last 
'while  human  nature  lasts.' 

It  is  fitting  that  our  last  quotation  should 
be  one  which  leaves  the  Cardinal  face  to 
face  with  his  faith. 


170  CARDINAL  NEWMAN 

Dr.  Newman's  poetry  cannot  be  passed 
over  without  a  word,  though  I  am  ill-fitted 
to  do  it  justice.  Lead>  Kindly  Light  has 
forced  its  way  into  every  hymn-book  and 
heart.  Those  who  go,  and  those  who  do 
not  go  to  church,  the  fervent  believer  and 
the  tired-out  sceptic  here  meet  on  common 
ground.  The  language  of  the  verses  in 
their  intense  sincerity  seems  to  reduce  all 
human  feelings,  whether  fed  on  dogmas 
and  holy  rites  or  on  man's  own  sad  heart, 
to  a  common  denominator. 

'  The  night  is  dark,  and  I  am  far  from  home, 
Lead  Thou  me  on.' 

The  believer  can  often  say  no  more.     The 
unbeliever  will  never  willingly  say  less. 

Amongst  Dr.  Newman's  Verses  on  Vari- 
ous Occasions  —  though  in  some  cases  the 
earlier  versions  to  be  met  with  in  the  Lyra 
Apostolica  are  to  be  preferred  to  the  later 
—  poems  will  be  found  by  those  who  seek, 
conveying  sure  and  certain  evidence  of  the 
possession  by  the  poet  of  the  true  lyrical 
gift  —  though  almost  cruelly  controlled  by 
the  course  of  the  poet's  thoughts  and  the 
nature  of  his  subjects.  One  is  sometimes 


CARDINAL  NEWMAN  171 

constrained  to  cry,  'Oh,  if  he  could  only 
'get  out  into  the  wild  blowing  airs,  how 
'  his  pinions  would  sweep  the  skies ! '  but 
such  thoughts  are  unlicensed  and  unseemly. 
That  we  have  two  such  religious  poets  as 
Cardinal  Newman  and  Miss  Christina  Ros- 
setti  is  or  ought  to  be  matter  for  sincere 
rejoicing. 

II 

To  the  inveterate  truth-hunter  there  has 
been  much  of  melancholy  in  the  very  nu- 
merous estimates,  hasty  estimates  no  doubt, 
but  all  manifestly  sincere,  which  the  death 
of  Cardinal  Newman  has  occasioned. 

The  nobility  of  the  pursuit  after  truth 
wherever  the  pursuit  may  lead  has  been 
abundantly  recognised.  Nobody  has  been 
base  enough  or  cynical  enough  to  venture 
upon  a  sneer.  It  has  been  marvellous  to 
notice  what  a  hold  an  unpopular  thinker, 
dwelling  very  far  apart  from  the  trodden 
paths  of  English  life  and  thought,  had 
obtained  upon  men's  imaginations.  The 
'man  in  the  street'  was  to  be  heard  de- 
claring that  the  dead  Cardinal  was  a  fine 
fellow.  The  newspaper-makers  were  as- 


1/2  CARDINAL  NEWMAN 

tonished  at  the  interest  displayed  by  their 
readers.  How  many  of  these  honest 
mourners,  asked  the  Globe,  have  read  a 
page  of  Newman's  writings  ?  It  is  a  vain 
inquiry.  Newman's  books  have  long  had 
a  large  and  increasing  sale.  They  stand 
on  all  sorts  of  shelves,  and  wherever  they 
go  a  still,  small  voice  accompanies  them. 
They  are  speaking  books ;  an  air  breathes 
from  their  pages. 

'  Again  I  saw  and  I  confess'd 

Thy  speech  was  rare  and  high, 
And  yet  it  vex'd  my  burden'd  breast, 
And  scared  I  knew  not  why.' 

It  is  a  strange  criticism  that  recently 
declared  Newman's  style  to  lack  individu- 
ality. Oddity  it  lacked,  and  mannerisms, 
but  not,  so  it  seems  to  me,  individuality. 

But  this  wide  recognition  of  Newman's 
charm  both  of  character  and  style  cannot 
conceal  from  the  anxious  truth-hunter  that 
there  has  been  an  almost  equally  wide 
recognition  of  the  futility  of  Newman's 
method  and  position. 

Method  and  position  ?  These  were  sa- 
cred words  with  the  Cardinal.  But  a  few 
days  ago  he  seemed  securely  posed  before 


CARDINAL  NEWMAN  173 

the  world.  It  cannot  surely  have  been  his 
unrivalled  dialectics  only  that  made  men 
keep  civil  tongues  in  their  heads  or  hesi- 
tate to  try  conclusions  with  him.  It  was 
rather,  we  presume,  that  there  was  no  es^ 
pecial  occasion  to  speak  of  him  otherwise 
than  with  the  respect  and  affection  due  to 
honoured  age.  But  when  he  is  dead — it 
is  different.  It  is  necessary  then  to  gauge 
his  method  and  to  estimate  his  influence, 
not  as  a  living  man,  but  as  a  dead  one. 

And  what  has  that  estimate  been  ?  The 
saintly  life,  the  mysterious  presence,  are 
admitted,  and  well-nigh  nothing  else.  All 
sorts  of  reasons  are  named,  some  plausi- 
ble, all  cunningly  contrived,  to  account  for 
Newman's  quarrel  with  the  Church  of  his 
baptism.  A  writer  in  the  Guardian  sug- 
gests one,  a  writer  in  the  Times  another, 
a  writer  in  the  Satiirday  Review  a  third, 
and  so  on. 

However  much  these  reasons  may  differ 
one  from  another,  they  all  agree  in  this, 
that  of  necessity  they  have  ceased  to  oper- 
ate. They  were  personal  reasons,  and 
perished  with  the  man  whose  faith  and 
actions  they  controlled.  Nobody  else,  it 


1/4  CARDINAL  NEWMAN 

has  been  throughout  assumed,  will  become 
a  Romanist  for  the  same  reasons  as  John 
Henry  Newman.  If  he  had  not  been 
brought  up  an  Evangelical,  if  he  had  learnt 
German,  if  he  had  married,  if  he  had  been 
made  an  archdeacon,  all  would  have  been 
different. 

There  is  something  positively  terrible  in 
this  natural  history  of  opinion.  All  the  pas- 
sion and  the  pleading  of  a  life,  the  thought, 
and  the  labour,  the  sustained  argument, 
the  library  of  books,  reduced  to  what  ?  —  a 
series  of  accidents ! 

Newman  himself  well  knew  this  aspect  of 
affairs.  No  one's  plummet  since  Pascal's 
had  taken  deeper  soundings  of  the  infirmity 
—  the  oceanic  infirmity  —  of  the  intellect. 
What  actuary,  he  asks  contemptuously,  can 
appraise  the  value  of  a  man's  opinions  ?  In 
how  many  a  superb  passage  does  he  exhibit 
the  absurd,  the  haphazard  fashion  in  which 
men  and  women  collect  the  odds  and  ends, 
the  bits  and  scraps  they  are  pleased  to  place 
in  the  museum  of  their  minds,  and  label,  in 
all  good  faith,  their  convictions  !  Newman 
almost  revels  in  such  subjects.  The  sol- 
emn pomposity  which  so  frequently  digni- 


CARDINAL  NEWMAN  1/5 

fies  with  the  name  of  research  or  inquiry 
feeble  scratchings  amongst  heaps  of  ver- 
bosity had  no  more  determined  foe  than  the 
Cardinal. 

But  now  the  same  measure  is  being  meted 
out  to  him,  and  we  are  told  of  a  thinker's 
life  —  it  is  nought. 

He  thought  he  had  constructed  a  way  of 
escape  from  the  City  of  Destruction  for 
himself  and  his  followers  across  the  bridge 
of  that  illative  sense  which  turns  conclu- 
sions into  assents,  and  opinions  into  faiths 
—  but  the  bridge  seems  no  longer  stand- 
ing. 

The  writer  in  the  Guardian,  who  attrib- 
utes Newman's  restlessness  in  the  English 
Church  to  the  smug  and  comfortable  life 
of  many  of  its  clergy  rather  than  to  any 
especial  craving  after  authority,  no  doubt 
wrote  with  knowledge. 

A  married  clergy  seemed  always  to  an- 
noy Newman.  Readers  of  Loss  and  Gain 
are  not  likely  to  forget  the  famous  'pork 
chop '  passage,  which  describes  a  young  par- 
son and  his  bride  bustling  into  a  stationer's 
shop  to  buy  hymnals  and  tracts.  What  was 
once  only  annoyance  at  some  of  the  ways 


176  CARDINAL  NEWMAN 

of  John  Bull  on  his  knees,  soon  ripened 
into  something  not  very  unlike  hatred. 
Never  was  any  invention  less  ben  trovato 
than  that  which  used  to  describe  Newman 
as  pining  after  the  '  incomparable  liturgy ' 
or  the  '  cultured  society '  of  the  Church  of 
England.  He  hated  ex  animo  all  those  as- 
pects of  Anglicanism  which  best  recom- 
mend it  to  Erastian  minds.  A  church  of 
which  sanctity  is  not  a  note  is  sure  to  have 
many  friends. 

The  Saturday  Review  struck  up  a  fine 
national  tune  : 

'An  intense  but  narrow  conception  of 
'personal  holiness,  and  personal  satisfac- 
'  tion  with  dogma,  ate  him  (Newman)  up  — 
'the  natural  legacy  of  the  Evangelical 
'  school  in  which  he  had  been  nursed,  the 
'great  tradition  of  Tory  churchmanship, 
'  of  pride  in  the  Church  of  England,  as 
'suc/i,  of  determination  to  stand  shoulder 
'to  shoulder  in  resisting  the  foreigner, 
'whether  he  came  from  Rome  or  from 
'  Geneva,  from  Tubingen,  or  from  Saint 
'  Sulpice,  of  the  union  of  all  social  and 
'  intellectual  culture  with  theological  learn- 
'ing  —  the  idea  which,  alone  of  all  such 


CARDINAL  NEWMAN  177 

'ideas,  has  made  education  patriotic,  and 
'  orthodoxy  generous,  made  insufficient  ap- 
'  peal  to  him,  and  for  want  of  it  he  himself 
'made  shipwreck.' 

Here  is  John  Bullism,  bold  and  erect. 
If  the  Ark  of  Peter  won't  hoist  the  Union 
Jack,  John  Bull  must  have  an  Ark  of  his 
own,  with  patriotic  clergy  of  his  own  man- 
ufacture tugging  at  the  oar,  and  with 
nothing  foreign  in  the  hold  save  some 
sound  old  port.  '  It  will  always  be  remem- 
'  bered  to  Newman's  credit,'  says  this  same 
reviewer,  'that  he  knew  good  wine  if  he 
'did  not  drink  much.'  Mark  the  'If; 
there  is  much  virtue  in  it. 

We  are  now  provided  with  two  causes 
of  Newman's  discomfort  in  the  Church  of 
England  —  its  too  comfortable  clergy,  and 
its  too  frequent  introduction  of  the  lion 
and  the  unicorn  amongst  the  symbols  of 
religion — both  effective  causes,  as  may  be 
proved  by  many  passages  ;  but  to  say  that 
either  or  both  availed  to  drive  him  out, 
and  compelled  him  to  seek  shelter  at  the 
hands  of  one  whom  he  had  long  regarded 
as  a  foe,  is  to  go  very  far  indeed. 

It  should  not  be  overlooked  that  these 


178  CARDINAL  NEWMAN 

minimisers  of  Newman's  influence  are  all 
firmly  attached  for  different  reasons  to 
the  institution  Newman  left.  Their  judg- 
ments therefore  cannot  be  allowed  to  pass 
unchallenged.  What  Disraeli  meant  when 
he  said  that  Newman's  secession  had  dealt 
the  Church  of  England  a  blow  under  which 
it  still  reeled,  was  that  by  this  act  New- 
man expressed  before  the  whole  world  his 
profound  conviction  that  our  so-called  Na- 
tional Church  was  not  a  branch  of  the 
Church  Catholic.  And  this  really  is  the 
point  of  weakness  upon  which  Newman 
hurled  himself.  This  is  the  damage  he 
did  to  the  Church  of  this  island.  Through- 
out all  his  writings,  in  a  hundred  places,  in 
jests  and  sarcasms  as  well  as  in  papers  and 
arguments,  there  crops  up  this  settled 
conviction  that  England  is  not  a  Catholic 
country,  and  that  John  Bull  is  not  a  mem- 
ber of  the  Catholic  Church. 

This  may  not  matter  much  to  the  British 
electorate ;  but  to  those  who  care  about 
such  things,  who  rely  upon  the  validity  of 
orders  and  the  efficacy  of  sacraments,  who 
need  a  pedigree  for  their  faith,  who  do  not 
agree  with  Emerson  that  if  a  man  would 


CARDINAL  NEWMAN  179 

be  great  he  must  be  a  Nonconformist  — 
over  these  people  it  would  be  rash  to  as- 
sume that  Newman's  influence  is  spent. 
The  general  effect  of  his  writings,  the  de- 
mands they  awaken,  the  spirit  they  breathe, 
are  all  hostile  to  Anglicanism.  They  create 
a  profound  dissatisfaction  with,  a  distaste 
for,  the  Church  of  England  as  by  law  es- 
tablished. Those  who  are  affected  by  this 
spirit  will  no  longer  be  able  comfortably  to 
enjoy  the  maimed  rites  and  practices  of 
their  Church.  They  will  feel  their  place 
is  elsewhere,  and  sooner  or  later  they  will 
pack  up  and  go.  It  is  far  too  early  in  the 
day  to  leave  Newman  out  of  sight. 

But  to  end  where  we  began.  There  has 
been  scant  recognition  in  the  Cardinal's 
case  of  the  usefulness  of  devoting  life  to 
anxious  inquiries  after  truth.  It  is  very 
noble  to  do  so,  and  when  you  come  to  die, 
the  newspapers,  from  the  Times  to  the 
Sporting  Life,  will  first  point  out,  after 
their  superior  fashion,  how  much  better  was 
this  pure-minded  and  unworldly  thinker 
than  the  soiled  politician,  full  of  oppor- 
tunism and  inconsistency,  trying  hard  to 
drown  the  echoes  of  his  past  with  his  loud 


ISO  CARDINAL  NEWMAN 

vociferations,  and  then  proceed  in  a  few 
short  sentences  to  establish  how  out  of 
date  is  this  Thinker's  thought,  how  false 
his  reasoning,  how  impossible  his  conclu- 
sions, and  lastly,  how  dead  his  influence. 

It  is  very  puzzling  and  difficult,  and  drives 
some  men  to  collect  butterflies  and  beetles. 
Thinkers  are  not,  however,  to  be  disposed 
of  by  scratches  of  the  pen.  A  Cardinal  of 
the  Roman  Church  is  not,  to  say  the  least 
of  it,  more  obviously  a  shipwreck  than  a 
dean  or  even  a  bishop  of  the  English  es- 
tablishment. Character,  too,  counts  for 
something.  Of  Newman  it  may  be  said  : 

'Fate  gave  what  chance  shall  not  control, 
His  sad  lucidity  of  soul.' 

But  the  truth-hunter  is  still  unsatisfied. 


MATTHEW  ARNOLD 


THE  news  of  Mr.  Arnold's  sudden  death 
at  Liverpool  struck  a  chill  into  many  hearts, 
for  although  a  somewhat  constrained  writer 
(despite  his  playfulness)  and  certainly  the 
least  boisterous  of  men,  he  was  yet  most 
distinctly  on  the  side  of  human  enjoyment. 
He  conspired  and  contrived  to  make  things 
pleasant.  Pedantry  he  abhorred.  He  was 
a  man  of  this  life  and  this  world.  A 
severe  critic  of  the  world  he  indeed  was, 
but  finding  himself  in  it  and  not  precisely 
knowing  what  is  beyond  it,  like  a  brave 
and  true-hearted  man  he  set  himself  to 
make  the  best  of  it.  Its  sight  and  sounds 
were  dear  to  him.  The  'uncrumpling 
'  fern,'  the  eternal  moon-lit  snow,  '  Sweet 
'William  with  its  homely  cottage-smell,' 
'the  red  grouse  springing  at  our  sound,' 

181 


1 82  MATTtfEW  ARNOLD 

the  tinkling  bells  of  the  '  high-pasturing 
'kine,'  the  vagaries  of  men,  women,  and 
dogs,  their  odd  ways  and  tricks,  whether 
of  mind  or  manner,  all  delighted,  amused, 
tickled  him.  Human  loves,  joys,  sorrows, 
human  relationships,  ordinary  ties  inter- 
ested him  : 

'  The  help  in  strife, 
The  thousand  sweet  still  joys  of  such 
As  hand  in  hand  face  earthly  life.' 

In  a  sense  of  the  words  which  is  noble  and 
blessed,  he  was  of  the  Earth  Earthy. 

In  his  earlier  days  Mr.  Arnold  was  much 
misunderstood.  That  rowdy  Philistine  the 
Daily  Telegraph  called  him  '  a  prophet  of 
'the  kid-glove  persuasion,'  and  his  own 
too  frequent  iteration  of  the  somewhat 
dandiacal  phrase  '  sweetness  and  light ' 
helped  to  promote  the  notion  that  he  was 
a  fanciful,  finikin  Oxonian, 

'  A  fine  puss  gentleman  that's  all  perfume,' 

quite  unfit  for  the  most  ordinary  wear  and 
tear  of  life.  He  was  in  reality  nothing  of 
the  kind,  though  his  literary  style  was  a 
little  in  keeping  with  this  false  conception. 
His  mind  was  based  on  the  plainest  possi- 


MATTHEW  ARNOLD  183 

ble  things.  What  he  hated  most  was  the 
fantastic  —  the  far-fetched,  all  elaborated 
fancies,  and  strained  interpretations.  He 
stuck  to  the  beaten  track  of  human  experi- 
ence, and  the  broader  the  better.  He  was 
a  plain-sailing  man.  This  is  his  true  note. 
In  his  much  criticised,  but  as  I  think  admi- 
rable introduction  to  the  selection  he  made 
from  Wordsworth's  poems,  he  admits  that 
the  famous  Ode  on  Intimations  of  Immor- 
tality from  Recollections  in  Early  Child- 
hood is  not  one  of  his  prime  favourites, 
and  in  that  connection  he  quotes  from 
Thucydides  the  following  judgment  on  the 
early  exploits  .of  the  Greek  Race  and 
applies  it  to  these  intimations  of  immor- 
tality in  babies.  '  It  is  impossible  to  speak 
'with  certainty  of  what  is  so  remote,  but 
'from  all  that  we  can  really  investigate 
'  I  should  say  that  they  were  no  very  great 
'things.' 

This  quotation  is  in  Mr.  Arnold's  own 
vein.  His  readers  will  have  no  difficulty 
in  calling  to  mind  numerous  instances  in 
which  his  dislike  of  everything  not  broadly 
based  on  the  generally  admitted  facts  of 
sane  experience  manifests  itself.  Though 


1 84  MATTHEW  ARNOLD 

fond  —  perhaps  exceptionally  fond  —  of 
pretty  things  and  sayings,  be  had  a  severe 
taste,  and  hated  whatever  struck  him  as 
being  in  the  least  degree  sickly,  or  silly,  or 
over-heated.  No  doubt  he  may  often  have 
considered  that  to  be  sickly  or  silly  which 
in  the  opinion  of  others  was  pious  and  be- 
coming. It  may  be  that  he  was  over-im- 
patient of  men's  flirtations  with  futurity. 
As  his  paper  on  Professor  Dowden's  Life 
of  Shelley  shows,  he  disapproved  of  'irreg- 
ular relations.'  He  considered  we  were  all 
married  to  plain  Fact,  and  objected  to  our 
carrying  on  a  flirtation  with  mystic  may- 
be's  and  calling  it  Religion.  Had  it  been 
a  man's  duty  to  believe  in  a  specific  revela- 
tion it  would  have  been  God's  duty  to 
make  that  revelation  credible.  Such,  at 
all  events,  would  appear  to  have  been  the 
opinion  of  this  remarkable  man,  who 
though  he  had  even  more  than  his  share  of 
an  Oxonian's  reverence  for  the  great 
Bishop  of  Durham,  was  unable  to  admit 
the  force  of  the  main  argument  of  The 
Analogy.  Mr.  Arnold  was  indeed  too  fond 
of  parading  his  inability  for  hard  reasoning. 
I  am  not,  he  keeps  saying,  like  the  Arch- 


MATTHEW  ARNOLD  185 

bishop  of  York,  or  the  Bishop  of  Glouces- 
ter and  Bristol.  There  was  affectation 
about  this,  for  his  professed  inferiority  did 
not  prevent  him  from  making  it  almost 
excruciatingly  clear  that  in  his  opinion 
those  gifted  prelates  were,  whilst  exercis- 
ing their  extraordinary  powers,  only  beat- 
ing the  air,  or  in  plainer  words  busily 
engaged  in  talking  nonsense.  But  I  must 
not  wander  from  my  point,  which  simply  is 
that  Arnold's  dislike  of  anything  recondite 
or  remote  was  intense,  genuine,  and  char- 
acteristic. 

He  always  asserted  himself  to  be  a  good 
Liberal.  So  in  truth  he  was.  A  better 
Liberal  than  many  a  one  whose  claim  to 
that  title  it  would  be  thought  absurd  to 
dispute.  He  did  not  indeed  care  very 
much  about  some  of  the  articles  of  the 
Liberal  creed  as  now  professed.  He  had 
taken  a  great  dislike  to  the  Deceased 
Wife's  Sister  Bill.  He  wished  the  Church 
and  the  State  to  continue  to  recognise  each 
other.  He  had  not  that  jealousy  of  State 
interference  in  England  which  used  to  be 
(it  is  so  no  longer)  a  note  of  political 
Liberalism.  He  sympathised  with  Italian 


1 86  MATTHEW  ARNOLD 

national  aspirations  because  he  thought  it 
wrong  to  expect  a  country  with  such  a 
past  as  Italy  to  cast  in  her  lot  with  Aus- 
tria. He  did  not  sympathise  with  Irish 
national  aspirations  because  he  thought 
Ireland  ought  to  be  willing  to  admit  that 
she  was  relatively  to  England  an  inferior 
and  less  interesting  country,  and  therefore 
one  which  had  no  moral  claim  for  national 
institutions.  He  may  have  been  right  or 
wrong  on  these  points  without  affecting 
his  claim  to  be  considered  a  Liberal.  Lib- 
eralism is  not  a  creed,  but  a  frame  of  mind. 
Mr.  Arnold's  frame  of  mind  was  Liberal. 
No  living  man  is  more  deeply  permeated 
with  the  grand  doctrine  of  Equality  than 
was  he.  He  wished  to  see  his  country- 
men and  countrywomen  all  equal :  Jack 
as  good  as  his  master,  and  Jack's  master 
as  good  as  Jack ;  and  neither  taking  clap- 
trap. He  had  a  hearty  un-English  dislike 
of  anomalies  and  absurdities.  He  fully 
appreciated  the  French  Revolution  and 
was  consequently  a  Democrat.  He  was 
not  a  democrat  from  irresistible  impulse, 
or  from  love  of  mischief,  or  from  hatred 
of  priests,  or  like  the  average  British  work- 


MATTHEW  ARNOLD  187 

man  from  a  not  unnatural  desire  to  get 
something  on  account  of  his  share  of  the 
family  inheritance  —  but  all  roads  lead  to 
Rome,  and  Mr.  Arnold  was  a  democrat 
from  a  sober  and  partly  sorrowful  convic- 
tion that  no  other  form  of  government  was 
possible.  He  was  an  Educationalist,  and 
Education  is  the  true  Leveller.  His  al- 
most passionate  cry  for  better  middle- 
class  education  arose  from  his  annoyance 
at  the  exclusion  of  large  numbers  of  this 
great  class  from  the  best  education  the 
country  afforded.  It  was  a  ticklish  job 
telling  this  great,  wealthy,  middle  class  — 
which  according  to  the  newspapers  had 
made  England  what  she  is  and  what 
everybody  else  wishes  to  be  —  that  it 
was,  from  an  educational  point  of  view, 
beneath  contempt.  *  I  hear  with  surprise,' 
said  Sir  Thomas  Bazley  at  Manchester, 
'that  the  education  of  our  great  middle 
'  class  requires  improvement.'  But  Mr. 
Arnold  had  courage.  Indeed  he  carried 
one  kind  of  courage  to  an  heroic  pitch.  I 
mean  the  courage  of  repeating  yourself 
over  and  over  again.  It  is  a  sound  foren- 
sic maxim  :  Tell  a  judge  twice  whatever 


1 88  MATTHEW  ARNOLD 

you  want  him  to  hear.  Tell  a  special  jury 
thrice,  and  a  common  jury  half-a-dozen 
times  the  view  of  a  case  you  wish  them  to 
entertain.  Mr.  Arnold  treated  the  middle 
class  as  a  common  jury  and  hammered 
away  at  them  remorselessly  and  with  the 
most  unblushing  iteration.  They  groaned 
under  him,  they  snorted,  and  they  sniffed 
—  but  they  listened,  and,  what  was  more 
to  the  purpose,  their  children  listened,  and 
with  filial  frankness  told  their  heavy  sires 
that  Mr.  Arnold  was  quite  right,  and  that 
their  lives  were  dull,  and  hideous,  and  arid, 
even  as  he  described  them  as  being.  Mr. 
Arnold's  work  as  a  School  Inspector  gave 
him  great  opportunities  of  going  about 
amongst  all  classes  of  the  people.  Though 
not  exactly  apostolic  in  manner  or  method, 
he  had  something  to  say  both  to  and  of 
everybody.  The  aristocracy  were  polite 
and  had  ways  he  admired,  but  they  were 
impotent  of  ideas  and  had  a  dangerous 
tendency  to  become  studiously  frivolous. 
Consequently  the  Future  did  not  belong 
to  them.  Get  ideas  and  study  gravity,  was 
the  substance  of  his  discourse  to  the  Bar- 
barians, as,  with  that  trick  of  his  of  mis- 


MATTHEW  ARNOLD  189 

calling  God's  creatures,  he  had  the  effron- 
tery to  dub  our  adorable  nobility.  But  it 
was  the  middle  class  upon  whom  fell  the 
full  weight  of  his  discourse.  His  sermons 
to  them  would  fill  a  volume.  Their  great 
need  was  culture,  which  he  declared  to 
be  a  study  of  perfection,  the  sentiment 
for  beauty  and  sweetness,  the  sentiment 
against  hideousness  and  rawness.  The 
middle  class,  he  protested,  needed  to  know 
all  the  best  things  that  have  been  said  and 
done  in  the  world  since  it  began,  and  to  be 
thereby  lifted  out  of  their  holes  and  cor- 
ners, private  academies  and  chapels  in  side 
streets,  above  their  tenth-rate  books  and 
miserable  preferences,  into  the  main  stream 
of  national  existence.  The  lower  orders 
he  judged  to  be  a  mere  rabble,  and  thought 
it  was  as  yet  impossible  to  predict  whether 
or  not  they  would  hereafter  display  any 
aptitude  for  Ideas,  or  passion  for  Perfec- 
tion. But  in  the  meantime  he  bade  them 
learn  to  cohere,  and  to  read  and  write,  and 
above  all  he  conjured  them  not  to  imitate 
the  middle  classes. 

It  is  not  easy  to  know  everything  about 
everybody,  and  it  may  be  doubted  whether 


MATTHEW  ARNOLD 

Mr.  Arnold  did  not  over-rate  the  degree 
of  acquaintance  with  his  countrymen  his 
peregrinations  among  them  had  conferred 
upon  him.  In  certain  circles  he  was  sup- 
posed to  have  made  the  completest  possible 
diagnosis  of  dissent,  and  was  credited  with 
being  able,  after  five  minutes'  conversation 
with  any  individual  Nonconformist,  unerr- 
ingly to  assign  him  to  his  particular  chapel, 
Independent,  Baptist,  Primitive  Methodist, 
Unitarian,  or  whatever  else  it  might  be, 
and  this  though  they  had  only  been  talking 
about  the  weather.  To  people  who  know 
nothing  about  dissenters,  Mr.  Arnold  might 
well  seem  to  know  everything.  However, 
he  did  know  a  great  deal,  and  used  his 
knowledge  with  great  cunning  and  effect, 
and  a  fine  instinctive  sense  of  the  where- 
abouts of  the  weakest  points.  Mr.  Arnold's 
sense  for  equality  and  solidarity  was  not 
impeded  by  any  exclusive  tastes  or  hobbies. 
Your  collector,  even  though  it  be  but  of 
butterflies,  is  rarely  a  democrat.  One  of 
Arnold's  favourite  lines  in  Wordsworth 
was  — 

'Joy  that  is  in  widest  commonalty  spread.' 

The  collector's  joys  are  not  of  that  kind. 


MATTHEW  ARNOLD  191 

Mr.  Arnold  was  not,  I  believe,  a  collector 
of  anything.  He  certainly  was  not  of 
books.  I  once  told  him  I  had  been  read- 
ing a  pamphlet,  written  by  him  in  1859,  on 
the  Italian  Question.  He  inquired  how  I 
came  across  it.  I  said  I  had  picked  it  up 
in  a  shop.  'Oh,  yes,'  said  he,  'some  old 
'curiosity  shop,  I  suppose.'  Nor  was  he 
joking.  He  seemed  quite  to  suppose  that 
old  books,  and  old  clothes,  and  old  chairs 
were  huddled  together  for  sale  in  the  same 
resort  of  the  curious.  He  did  not  care 
about  such  things.  The  prices  given  for 
the  early  editions  of  his  own  poems  seemed 
to  tease  him.  His  literary  taste  was 
broadly  democratic.  He  had  no  mind  for 
fished-up  authors,  nor  did  he  ever  indulge 
in  swaggering  rhapsodies  over  second-rate 
poets.  The  best  was  good  enough  for 
him.  'The  best  poetry'  was  what  he 
wanted,  '  a  clearer,  deeper  sense  of  the  best 
'  in  poetry,  and  of  the  strength  and  joy  to 
'be  drawn  from  it.'  So  he  wrote  in  his 
general  introduction  to  Mr.  Ward's  Selec- 
tions from  the  English  Poets.  The  best  of 
everything  for  everybody.  This  was  his, 
gospel  and  his  prayer, 


192  MATTHEW  ARNOLD 

Approaching  Mr.  Arnold's  writings  more 
nearly,  it  seems  inevitable  to  divide  them 
into  three  classes.  His  poems,  his  theo- 
logical excursions,  and  his  criticism,  using 
the  last  word  in  a  wide  sense  as  including 
a  criticism  of  life  and  of  politics  as  well  as 
of  books  and  style. 

Of  Mr.  Arnold's  poetry  it  is  hard  for  any- 
one who  has  felt  it  to  the  full  during  the 
most  impressionable  period  of  life  to  speak 
without  emotion  overcoming  reason. 

'  Hardly  shall  I  tell  my  joys  and  sorrows, 
Hopes  and  fears,  belief  and  unbelieving.' 

It  is  easy  to  admit,  in  general  terms,  its 
limitations.  -  Mr.  Arnold  is  the  last  man  in 
the  world  anybody  would  wish  to  shove  out 
of  his  place.  A  poet  at  all  points,  armed 
cap-a-pie  against  criticism,  like  Lord  Ten- 
nyson, he  certainly  was  not.  Nor  had  his 
verse  any  share  of  the  boundless  vitality, 
the  fierce  pulsation  so  nobly  characteristic 
of  Mr.  Browning.  But  these  admissions 
made,  we  decline  to  parley  any  further  with 
the  enemy.  We  cast  him  behind  us.  Mr. 
Arnold,  to  those  who  cared  for  him  at  all, 
was  the  most  useful  poet  of  his  day.  He 


MATTHEW  ARNOLD  193 

lived  much  nearer  us  than  poets  of  his  dis- 
tinction usually  do.  He  was  neither  a 
prophet  nor  a  recluse.  He  lived  neither 
above  us,  nor  away  from  us.  There  are 
two  ways  of  being  a  recluse  —  a  poet  may 
live  remote  from  men,  or  he  may  live  in 
a  crowded  street  but  remote  from  their 
thoughts.  Mr.  Arnold  did  neither,  and 
consequently  his  verse  tells  and  tingles. 
None  of  it  is  thrown  away.  His  readers 
feel  that  he  bore  the  same  yoke  as  them- 
selves. Theirs  is  a  common  bondage  with 
his.  Beautiful,  surpassingly  beautiful  some 
of  Mr.  Arnold's  poetry  is,  but  we  seize 
upon  the  thought  first  and  delight  in  the 
form  afterwards.  No  doubt  the  form  is  an 
extraordinary  comfort,  for  the  thoughts  are 
often,  as  thoughts  so  widely  spread  could 
not  fail  to  be,  the  very  thoughts  that  are 
too  frequently  expressed  rudely,  crudely, 
indelicately.  To  open  Mr.  Arnold's  poems 
is  to  escape  from  a  heated  atmosphere  and 
a  company  not  wholly  free  from  offence 
even  though  composed  of  those  who  share 
our  opinions  —  from  loud-mouthed  random 
talking  men  into  a  well-shaded  retreat  which 
seems  able  to  impart,  even  to  our  feverish 


194  MATTHEW  ARNOLD 

persuasions  and  crude  conclusions,  some- 
thing of  the  coolness  of  falling  water,  some- 
thing of  the  music  of  rustling  trees.  This 
union  of  thought,  substantive  thought,  with 
beauty  of  form  —  of  strength  with  elegance, 
is  rare.  I  doubt  very  much  whether  Mr. 
Arnold  ever  realised  the  devotedness  his 
verse  inspired  in  the  minds  of  thousands 
of  his  countrymen  and  countrywomen,  both 
in  the  old  world  and  the  new.  He  is  not 
a  bulky  poet.  Three  volumes  contain  him. 
But  hardly  a  page  can  be  opened  without 
the  eye  lighting  on  verse  which  at  one  time 
or  another  has  been,  either  to  you  or  to 
someone  dear  to  you,  strength  or  joy. 
The  Buried  Life,  A  Southern  Night,  Dover 
Beach,  A  Wanderer  is  Man  from  his  Birth, 
Rugby  Chapel,  Resignation.  How  easy  to 
prolong  the  list,  and  what  a  list  it  is  !  Their 
very  names  are  dear  to  us  even  as  are  the 
names  of  Mother  Churches  and  Holy 
Places  to  the  Votaries  of  the  old  Religion. 
I  read  the  other  day  in  the  Spectator  news- 
paper, an  assertion  that  Mr.  Arnold's  poetry 
had  never  consoled  anybody.  A  falser 
statement  was  never  made  innocently.  It 
may  never  have  consoled  the  writer  in  the 


MATTHEW  ARNOLD  195 

Spectator,  but  because  the  stomach  of  a 
dram-drinker  rejects  cold  water  is  no  kind 
of  reason  for  a  sober  man  abandoning  his 
morning  tumbler  of  the  pure  element.  Mr. 
Arnold's  poetry  has  been  found  full  of 
consolation.  It  would  be  strange  if  it  had 
not  been.  It  is 

'  No  stretched  metre  of  an  antique  song,' 

but  quick  and  to  the  point.  There  are 
finer  sonnets  in  the  English  language 
than  the  two  following,  but  there  are  no 
better  sermons.  And  if  it  be  said  that 
sermons  may  be  found  in  stones,  but 
ought  not  to  be  in  sonnets,  I  fall  back 
upon  the  fact  which  Mr.  Arnold  himself 
so  cheerfully  admitted,  that  the  middle 
classes,  who  in  England,  at  all  events,  are 
Mr.  Arnold's  chief  readers,  are  serious,  and 
love  sermons.  Some  day  perhaps  they 
will  be  content  with  metrical  exercises, 
ballades,  and  roundels. 

'  EAST  LONDON 

'  'T\vas  August,  and  the  fierce  sun  overhead 
Smote  on  the  squalid  streets  of  Bethnal  Green, 
And  the  pale  weaver,  through  his  windows  seen 
In  Spitalfields,  look'd  thrice  dispirited. 


196  MATTHEW  ARNOLD 

'  I  met  a  preacher  there  I  knew,  and  said : 
"  111  and  o'erwork'd,  how  fare  you  in  this  scene?  " 
"  Bravely !  "  said  he;  "  for  I  of  late  have  been 
Much  cheer'd  with  thoughts  of  Christ,  the  living  bread." 

1 0  human  soul !  as  long  as  thou  canst  so 
Set  up  a  mark  of  everlasting  light, 
Above  the  howling  senses'  ebb  and  flow, 
To  cheer  thee,  and  to  right  thee  if  thou  roam  — 
Not  with  lost  toil  thou  labourest  through  the  night ! 
Thou  mak'st  the  heaven  thou  hop'st  indeed  thy  home.' 

•THE  BETTER  PART 

1  Long  fed  on  boundless  hopes,  O  race  of  man, 
How  angrily  thou  spurn'st  all  simpler  fare  ! 
"  Christ,"  some  one  says,  "was  human  as  we  are; 
No  judge  eyes  us  from  Heaven,  our  sin  to  scan; 

'  We  live  no  more,  when  we  have  done  our  span."  — 
"Well,  then,   for   Christ,"   thou  answerest,  "who   can 

care? 

From  Sin,  which  Heaven  records  not,  why  forbear? 
Live  we  like  brutes  our  life  without  a  plan !  " 

'So  answerest  thou;  but  why  not  rather  say: 
"  Hath  man  no  second  life  ?  —  Pitch  this  one  high  I 
Sits  there  no  judge  in  Heaven,  our  sin  to  see? 

'  More  strictly,  then,  the  inward  judge  obey  ! 
Was  Christ  a  man  like  us?  —  Ah  !  let  us  try 
If -we  then,  too,  can  be  such  men  as  he  !  "  : 

Mr.  Arnold's  love  of  nature,  and  poetic 
treatment  of  nature,  was  to  many  a  vexed 


MATTHEW  ARNOLD  197 

soul  a  great  joy  and  an  intense  relief.  Mr. 
Arnold  was  a  genuine  Wordsworthian  — 
being  able  to  read  everything  Wordsworth 
ever  wrote  except  Vaudracour  and  Jidia. 
The  influence  of  Wordsworth  upon  him 
was  immense,  but  he  was  enabled,  by  the 
order  of  his  mind,  to  reject  with  the  hearti- 
est goodwill  the  cloudy  pantheism  which 
robs  so  much  of  Wordsworth's  best  verse 
of  the  heightened  charm  of  reality,  for, 
after  all,  poetry,  like  religion,  must  be  true, 
or  it  is  nothing.  This  strong  aversion  to 
the  unreal  also  prevented  Mr.  Arnold,  de- 
spite his  love  of  the  classical  forms,  from 
a  nonsensical  neo-paganism.  His  was  a 
manlier  attitude.  He  had  no  desire  to  keep 
tugging  at  the  dry  breasts  of  an  outworn 
creed,  nor  any  disposition  to  go  down  on 
his  knees,  or  hunkers  as  the  Scotch  more 
humorously  call  them,  before  plaster  casts 
of  Venus,  or  even  of  '  Proteus  rising  from 
'the  sea.'  There  was  something  very  re- 
freshing about  this.  In  the  long  run  even 
a  gloomy  truth  is  better  company  than  a 
cheerful  falsehood.  The  perpetual  strain 
of  living  down  to  a  lie,  the  depressing  at- 
mosphere of  a  circumscribed  intelligence 


198  MATTHEW  ARNOLD 

tell  upon  the  system,  and  the  cheerful 
falsehood  soon  begins  to  look  puffy  and 
dissipated. 


•THE  YOUTH  OF  NATURE. 

'  For,  oh !  is  it  you,  is  it  you, 
Moonlight,  and  shadow,  and  lake, 
And  mountains,  that  fill  us  with  joy, 
Or  the  poet  who  sings  you  so  well? 


More  than  the  singer  are  these 


Yourselves  and  your  fellows  ye  know  not ;  and  me, 

The  mateless,  the  one,  will  ye  know  ? 

Will  ye  scan  me,  and  read  me,  and  tell 

Of  the  thoughts  that  ferment  in  my  breast, 

My  longing,  my  sadness,  my  joy  ? 

Will  ye  claim  for  your  great  ones  the  gift 

To  have  rendered  the  gleam  of  my  skies, 

To  have  echoed  the  moan  of  my  seas, 

Uttered  the  voice  of  my  hills  ? 

When  your  great  ones  depart,  will  ye  say  : 

All  things  have  suffered  a  loss, 

Nature  is  hid  in  their  grave  ? 

Race  after  race,  man  after  man, 

Have  thought  that  my  secret  was  theirs, 

Have  dream'd  that  I  lived  but  for  them, 

That  they  were  my  glory  and  joy. 

They  are  dust,  they  are  changed,  they  are  gone  ! 

I  remain.' 


MATTHEW  ARNOLD  199 

When  a  poet  is  dead  we  turn  to  his 
verse  with  quickened  feelings.  He  rests 
from  his  labours.  We  still 

''  Stem  across  the  sea  of  life  by  night,' 

and  the  voice,  once  the  voice  of  the  living, 
of  one  who  stood  by  our  side,  has  for  a 
while  an  unfamiliar  accent,  coming  to  us  as 
it  does  no  longer  from  our  friendly  earth 
but  from  the  strange  cold  caverns  of 
death. 

'  Joy  comes  and  goes,  hope  ebbs  and  flows 

Like  the  wave, 

Change  doth  unknit  the  tranquil  strength  of  men. 
Love  lends  life  a  little  grace, 
A  few  sad  smiles  ;   and  then, 
Both  are  laid  in  one  cold  place, 
In  the  grave. 

'  Dreams  dawn  and  fly,  friends  smile  and  die 

Like  spring  flowers ; 
Our  vaunted  life  is  one  long  funeral. 
Men  dig  graves  with  bitter  tears 
For  their  dead  hopes ;  and  all, 
Mazed  with  doubts  and  sick  with  fears, 
Count  the  hours. 

'  We  count  the  hours !     These  dreams  of  ours, 

False  and  hollow, 
Do  we  go  hence  and  find  they  are  not  dead  ? 

Joys  we  dimly  apprehend, 
Faces  that  smiled  and  fled, 
Hopes  born  here,  and  born  to  end, 
Shall  we  follow?' 


200  MATTHEW  ARNOLD 

In  a  poem  like  this  Mr.  Arnold  is  seen 
at  his  best;  he  fairly  forces  himself  into 
the  very  front  ranks.  In  form  almost 
equal  to  Shelley,  or  at  any  rate  not  so 
very  far  behind  him,  whilst  of  course  in 
reality,  in  wholesome  thought,  in  the 
pleasures  that  are  afforded  by  thinking,  it 
is  of  incomparable  excellence. 

We  die  as  we  do,  not  as  we  would.  Yet 
on  reading  again  Mr.  Arnold's  Wish,  we 
feel  that  the  manner  of  his  death  was  much 
to  his  mind. 

'  A  WISH. 

'  I  ask  not  that  my  bed  of  death 

From  bands  of  greedy  heirs  be  free : 
For  these  besiege  the  latest  breath 
Of  fortune's  favoured  sons,  not  me. 

'  I  ask  not  each  kind  soul  to  keep 

Tearless,  when  of  my  death  he  hears. 
Let  those  who  will,  if  any — weep ! 
There  are  worse  plagues  on  earth  than  tears. 

'  I  ask  but  that  my  death  may  find 
The  freedom  to  my  life  denied; 
Ask  but  the  folly  of  mankind 

Then  —  then  at  last  to  quit  my  side. 

'  Spare  me  the  whispering,  crowded  room, 

The  friends  who  come,  and  gape,  and  go; 
The  ceremonious  air  of  gloom  — 

All,  which  makes  death  a  hideous  show ! 


MATTHEW  ARNOLD  2OI 

'  Nor  bring  to  see  me  cease  to  live 

Some  doctor  full  of  phrase  and  fame 
To  shake  his  sapient  head  and  give 
The  ill  he  cannot  cure  a  name. 

'  Nor  fetch  to  take  the  accustom'd  toll 
Of  the  poor  sinner  bound  for  death 
His  brother-doctor  of  the  soul 
To  canvass  with  official  breath 

'  The  future  and  its  viewless  things  — 

That  undiscover'd  mystery 
Which  one  who  feels  death's  winnowing  wings 
Must  needs  read  clearer,  sure,  than  he ! 

'  Bring  none  of  these;   but  let  me  be 

While  all  around  in  silence  lies, 
Moved  to  the  window  near,  and  see 
Once  more  before  my  dying  eyes, 

'  Bathed  in  the  sacred  dews  of  morn 

The  wide  aerial  landscape  spread  — 
The  world  which  was  ere  I  was  born, 
The  world  which  lasts  when  I  am  dead. 

'  Which  never  was  the  friend  of  one, 

Nor  promised  love  it  could  not  give, 
But  lit  for  all  its  generous  sun 
And  lived  itself  and  made  us  live. 

'  Then  let  me  gaze  —  till  I  become 

In  soul,  with  what  I  gaze  on,  wed ! 
To  feel  the  universe  my  home; 
To  have  before  my  mind  —  instead 

'  Of  the  sick  room,  the  mortal  strife, 
The  turmoil  for  a  little  breath  — 
The  pure  eternal  course  of  life, 

Not  human  combatings  with  death  1 


202  MATTHEW  ARNOLD 

1  Thus  feeling,  gazing,  let  me  grow 

Composed,  refresh'd,  ennobled,  clear  — 
Then  willing  let  my  spirit  go 

To  work  or  wait,  elsewhere  or  here ! ' 

To  turn  from  Arnold's  poetry  to  his 
theological  writings  —  if  so  grim  a  name 
can  be  given  to  these  productions  —  from 
Rugby  Chapel  to  Literature  and  Dogma, 
from  Obermann  to  God  and  the  Bible,  from 
Empedocles  on  Etna  to  St.  Paul  and  Prot- 
estantism, is  to  descend  from  the  lofty 
table-lands, 

'  From  the  dragon-warder'd  fountains 
Where  the  springs  of  knowledge  are, 
From  the  watchers  on  the  mountains 
And  the  bright  and  morning  star,' 

to  the  dusty  highroad.  It  cannot,  I  think, 
be  asserted  that  either  the  plan  or  the 
style  of  these  books  was  in  keeping  with 
their  subjects.  It  was  characteristic  of 
Mr.  Arnold,  and  like  his  practical  turn  of 
mind,  to  begin  Literature  and  Dogma  in 
the  Cornhill  Magazine.  A  book  rarely 
shakes  off  the  first  draft  —  Literature  and 
Dogma  never  did.  It  is  full  of  repetitions 
and  wearisome  recapitulations,  well  enough 
in  a  magazine  where  each  issue  is  sure  to 


MATTHEW  ARNOLD  203 

be  read  by  many  who  will  never  see  another 
number,  but  which  disfigure  a  book.  The 
style  is  likewise  too  jaunty.  Bantering 
the  Trinity  is  not  yet  a  recognised  English 
pastime.  Bishop-baiting  is,  but  this  not- 
withstanding, most  readers  of  Literature 
and  Dogma  grew  tired  of  the  Bishop  of 
Gloucester  and  Bristol  and  of  his  alleged 
desire  to  do  something  for  the  honour  of 
the  Godhead,  long  before  Mr.  Arnold 
showed  any  signs  of  weariness.  But  mak- 
ing all  these  abatements,  and  fully  admit- 
ting that  Literature  and  Dogma  is  not 
likely  to  prove  permanently  interesting  to 
the  English  reader,  it  must  be  pronounced 
a  most  valuable  and  useful  book,  and  one 
to  which  the  professional  critics  and  phi- 
losophers never  did  justice.  The  object  of 
Literature  and  Dogma  was  no  less  than 
the  restoration  of  the  use  of  the  Bible  to 
the  sceptical  laity.  It  was  a  noble  object, 
and  it  was  in  a  great  measure,  as  thou- 
sands of  quiet  people  could  testify,  attained. 
It  was  not  a  philosophical  treatise.  In  its 
own  way  it  was  the  same  kind  of  thing  as 
many  of  Cardinal  Newman's  writings.  It 
started  with  an  assumption,  namely,  that 


204  MATTHEW  ARNOLD 

it  is  impossible  to  believe  in  the  miracles 
recorded  in  the  Old  and  New  Testaments. 
There  is  no  laborious  attempt  to  distin- 
guish between  one  miracle  and  another,  or 
to  lighten  the  burden  of  faith  in  any  par- 
ticular. Nor  is  any  serious  attempt  made 
to  disprove  miracles.  Mr.  Arnold  did  not 
write  for  those  who  find  no  difficulty  in 
believing  in  the  first  chapter  of  St.  Luke's 
gospel,  or  the  sixteenth  chapter  of  St. 
Mark's,  but  for  those  who  simply  cannot 
believe  a  word  of  either  the  one  chapter  or 
the  other.  Mr.  Arnold  knew  well  that 
this  inability  to  believe  is  apt  to  generate 
in  the  mind  of  the  unbeliever  an  almost 
physical  repulsion  to  open  books  which  are 
full  of  supernatural  events.  Mr.  Arnold 
knew  this  and  lamented  it.  His  own  love 
of  the  Bible  was  genuine  and  intense.  He 
could  read  even  Jeremiah  and  Habakkuk. 
As  he  loved  Homer  with  one  side  of  him, 
so  he  loved  the  Bible  with  the  other.  He 
saw  how  men  were  crippled  and  maimed 
through  growing  up  in  ignorance  of  it,  and 
living  all  the  days  of  their  lives  outside 
its  influence.  He  longed  to  restore  it  to 
them,  to  satisfy  them  that  its  place  in  the 


MATTHEW  ARNOLD  2O$ 

mind  of  man  —  that  its  educational  and 
moral  power  was  not  due  to  the  miracles 
it  records  nor  to  the  dogmas  that  Catholics 
have  developed  or  Calvinists  extracted  from 
its  pages,  but  to  its  literary  excellence  and 
to  the  glow  and  enthusiasm  it  has  shed 
over  conduct,  self-sacrifice,  humanity,  and 
holy  living.  It  was  at  all  events  a  worthy 
object  and  a  most  courageous  task.  It 
exposed  him  to  a  heavy  cross-fire.  The 
Orthodox  fell  upon  his  book  and  abused 
it,  unrestrainedly  abused  it  for  its  familiar 
handling  of  their  sacred  books.  They 
almost  grudged  Mr.  Arnold  his  great  ac- 
quaintance with  the  Bible,  just  as  an 
Englishman  might  be  annoyed  at  finding 
Moltke  acquainted  with  all  the  roads  from 
Dover  to  London.  This  feeling  was  natu- 
ral, and  on  the  whole  I  think  it  creditable 
to  the  orthodox  party  that  a  book  so  need- 
lessly pain-giving  as  Literature  and  Dog- 
ma did  not  goad  them  into  any  personal 
abuse  of  its  author.  But  they  could  not 
away  with  the  book.  Nor  did  the  philo- 
sophical sceptic  like  it  much  better.  The 
philosophical  sceptic  is  too  apt  to  hate  the 
Bible,  even  as  the  devil  was  reported  to 


2O6  MATTHEW  ARNOLD 

hate  holy  water.  Its  spirit  condemns  him. 
Its  devout,  heart-stirring,  noble  language 
creates  an  atmosphere  which  is  deadly  for 
pragmatic  egotism.  To  make  men  once  more 
careful  students  of  the  Bible  was  to  deal  a 
blow  at  materialism,  and  consequently  was 
not  easily  forgiven.  '  Why  can't  you  leave 
the  Bible  alone  ? '  they  grumbled  —  '  What 
have  we  to  do  with  it  ? '  But  Pharisees 
and  Sadducees  do  not  exhaust  mankind, 
and  Mr.  Arnold's  contributions  to  the  relig- 
ious controversies  of  his  time  were  very 
far  from  the  barren  things  that  are  most 
contributions,  and  indeed  most  controver- 
sies on  such  subjects.  I  believe  I  am 
right  when  I  say  that  he  induced  a  very 
large  number  of  persons  to  take  up  again 
and  make  a  daily  study  of  the  books  both 
of  the  Old  and  the  New  Testament. 

As  a  literary  critic  Mr.  Arnold  had  at 
one  time  a  great  vogue.  His  Essays  in 
Criticism,  first  published  in  1865,  made  him 
known  to  a  larger  public  than  his  poems 
or  his  delightful  lectures  on  translating 
Homer  had  succeeded  in  doing.  He  had 
the  happy  knack  of  starting  interesting 
subjects  and  saying  all  sorts  of  interesting 


MATTHEW  ARNOLD  2O/ 

things  by  the  way.  There  was  the  French 
Academy.  Would  it  be  a  good  thing  to 
have  an  English  Academy  ?  He  started 
the  question  himself  and  answered  it  in  the 
negative.  The  public  took  it  out  of  his 
mouth  and  proceeded  to  discuss  it  for  itself, 
always  on  the  assumption  that  he  had  an- 
swered it  in  the  affirmative.  But  that  is 
the  way  with  the  public.  No  sensible  man 
minds  it.  To  set  something  going  is  the 
most  anybody  can  hope  to  do  in  this  world. 
Where  it  will  go  to,  and  what  sort  of  moss 
it  will  gather  as  it  goes,  for  despite  the 
proverb  there  is  nothing  incompatible  be- 
tween moss  and  motion,  no  one  can  say. 
In  this  volume,  too,  he  struck  the  note,  so 
frequently  and  usefully  repeated,  of  self- 
dissatisfaction.  To  make  us  dissatisfied 
with  ourselves,  alive  to  our  own  inferiority, 
not  absolute  but  in  important  respects,  to 
check  the  chorus,  then  so  loud,  of  self- 
approval  of  our  majestic  selves — to  make 
us  understand  why  nobody  who  is  not  an 
Englishman  wants  to  be  one,  this  was 
another  of  the  tasks  of  this  militant  man. 
We  all  remember  how  Wragg^-  is  in  cus- 

1  See  Essays   in  Criticism,  p.  23. 


208  MATTHEW  ARNOLD 

tody.  The  papers  on  Heine  and  Spinoza 
and  Marcus  Aurelius  were  read  with  ea- 
gerness, with  an  enjoyment,  with  a  sense  of 
widening  horizons  too  rare  to  be  easily  for- 
gotten. They  were  light  and  graceful,  but 
it  would  I  think  be  unjust  to  call  them 
slender.  They  were  not  written  for  spec- 
ialists or  even  for  students,  but  for  ordi- 
nary men  and  women,  particularly  for  young 
men  and  women,  who  carried  away  with 
them  from  the  reading  of  Essays  in  Crit- 
icism something  they  could  not  have  found 
anywhere  else  and  which  remained  with 
them  for  the  rest  of  their  days,  namely,  a 
way  of  looking  at  things.  A  perfectly  safe 
critic  Mr.  Arnold  hardly  was.  Even  in 
this  volume  he  fusses  too  much  about  the 
De  Gu6rins.  To  some  later  judgments  of 
his  it  would  be  unkind  to  refer.  It  was 
said  of  the  late  Lord  Justice  Mellish  by 
Lord  Cairns  that  he  went  right  instinc- 
tively. That  is,  he  did  not  flounder  into 
truth.  Mr.  Arnold  never  floundered,  but 
he  sometimes  fell.  A  more  delightful 
critic  of  literature  we  have  not  had  for 
long.  What  pleasant  reading  are  his 
Lectures  on  Translating  Homer,  which 


MATTHEW  ARNOLD  209 

ought  to  be  at  once  reprinted.  How  full 
of  good  things !  Not  perhaps  fit  to  be 
torn  from  their  contexts,  or  paraded  in  a 
commonplace  book,  but  of  the  kind  which 
give  a  reader  joy  —  which  make  literature 
tempting  —  which  revive,  even  in  dull  mid- 
dle-age, something  of  the  enthusiasm  of 
the  love-stricken  boy.  Then,  too,  his 
Study  of  Celtic  Literature.  It  does  not 
matter  much  whether  you  can  bring  your- 
self to  believe  in  the  Eisteddfod  or  not. 
In  fact  Mr.  Arnold  did  not  believe  in  it. 
He  knew  perfectly  well  that  better  poetry 
is  to  be  found  every  week  in  the  poet's 
corner  of  every  county  newspaper  in  Eng- 
land than  is  produced  annually  at  the 
Eisteddfod.  You  need  not  even  share 
Mr.  Arnold's  opinion  as  to  the  inherent 
value  of  Celtic  Literature,  though  this  is 
of  course  a  grave  question,  worthy  of  all 
consideration  —  but  his  Study  is  good 
enough  to  be  read  for  love.  It  is  full  of 
charming  criticism.  Most  critics  are  such 
savages  —  or  if  they  are  not  savages,  they 
are  full  of  fantasies,  and  are  capable  at 
any  moment  of  calling  Tom  Jones  dull,  or 
Sydney  Smith  a  bore.  Mr.  Arnold  was 


210  MATTHEW  ARNOLD 

not  a  savage,  and  could  no  more  have  called 
Tom  Jones  dull  or  Sydney  Smith  a  bore, 
than  Homer  heavy  or  Milton  vulgar.  He 
was  no  gloomy  specialist.  He  knew  it 
took  all  sorts  to  make  a  world.  He  was 
alive  to  life.  Its  great  movement  fasci- 
nated him,  even  as  it  had  done  Burke,  even 
as  it  did  Cardinal  Newman.  He  watched 
the  rushing  stream,  the  '  stir  of  existence,' 
the  good  and  the  bad,  the  false  and  the 
true,  with  an  interest  that  never  flagged. 
In  his  last  words  on  translating  Homer  he 
says :  '  And  thus  false  tendency  as  well 
'as  true,  vain  effort  as  well  as  fruitful,  go 
'  together  to  produce  that  great  movement 
'of  life,  to  present  that  immense  and 
'magic  spectacle  of  human  affairs,  which 
'from  boyhood  to  old  age  fascinates  the 
'gaze  of  every  man  of  imagination,  and 
'  which  would  be  his  terror  if  it  were  not 
'at  the  same  time  his  delight.' 

Mr.  Arnold  never  succeeded  in  getting 
his  countrymen  to  take  him  seriously  as  a 
practical  politician.  He  was  regarded  as 
an  unauthorised  practitioner  whose  pre- 
scriptions no  respectable  chemist  would 
consent  to  make  up.  He  had  not  the 


MATTHEW  ARNOLD  211 

diploma  of  Parliament,  nor  was  he  able, 
like  the  Secretary  of  an  Early  Closing 
Association,  to  assure  any  political  aspi- 
rant that  he  commanded  enough  votes  to 
turn  an  election.  When  Mr.  John  Morley 
took  occasion  after  Mr.  Arnold's  death  to 
refer  to  him  in  Parliament,  the  name  was 
received  respectfully  but  coldly.  And  yet 
he  was  eager  about  politics,  and  had  much 
to  say  about  political  questions.  His  work 
in  these  respects  was  far  from  futile.  What 
he  said  was  never  inept.  It  coloured  men's 
thoughts,  and  contributed  to  the  formation 
of  their  opinions  far  more  than  even  public 
meetings.  His  introduction  to  his  Report 
on  Popular  Education  in  France,  published 
in  1 86 1,  is  as  instructive  a  piece  of  writing 
as  is  to  be  found  in  any  historical  disquisi- 
tion of  the  last  three  decades.  The  paper 
on  '  My  Countrymen '  in  that  most  amus- 
ing book  Friendship's  Garland  (which  ought 
also  to  be  at  once  reprinted)  is  full  of  point. 

But  it  is  time  to  stop.  It  is  only  possi- 
ble to  stop  where  we  began.  Matthew 
Arnold  is  dead.  He  would  have  been  the 
last  man  to  expect  anyone  to  grow  hysteri- 


212  MATTHEW  ARNOLD 

cal  over  the  circumstance,  and  the  first 
to  denounce  any  strained  emotion.  //  riy 
a  pas  cThomme  nfaessaire.  No  one  ever 
grasped  this  great,  this  comforting,  this 
cooling,  this  self-destroying  truth  more 
cordially  than  he  did.  As  I  write  the 
words,  I  remember  how  he  employed  them 
in  his  preface  to  the  second  edition  of 
Essays  in  Criticism,  where  he  records  a 
conversation,  I  doubt  not  an  imaginary 
one,  between  himself  and  a  portly  jeweller 
from  Cheapside  —  his  fellow-traveller  on 
the  Woodford  branch  of  the  Great  Eastern 
line.  The  traveller  was  greatly  perturbed 
in  his  mind  by  the  murder  then  lately 
perpetrated  in  a  railway  carriage  by  the 
notorious  Miiller.  Mr.  Arnold  plied  him 
with  consolation.  '  Suppose  the  worst  to 
'  happen,'  I  said,  '  suppose  even  yourself  to 
'  be  the  victim  —  il  n'y  a  pas  d'Jiomme 
1 ntcessaire  —  we  should  miss  you  for  a  day 
'or  two  on  the  Woodford  Branch,  but  the 
'great  mundane  movement  would  still  go 
'on,  the  gravel  walks  of  your  villa  would 
'still  be  rolled,  dividends  would  still  be 
'paid  at  the  bank,  omnibuses  would  still 
'run,  there  would  still  be  the  old  crush  at 
'the  corner  of  Fenchurch  Street.' 


MA  TTHE  W  ARNOLD  2 1 3 

And   so  it   proves   for  all — for  portly 
jewellers  and  lovely  poets. 

'  The  Pillar  still  broods  o'er  the  fields 
Whicn  Dorder  Ennerdale  Lake, 
And  Egremont  sleeps  by  the  sea  — 
Nature  is  fresh  as  of  old, 
Is  lovely;  a  mortal  is  dead.' 


II 

LORD  BYRON'S  antipathies  were,  as  a  rule, 
founded  on  some  sound  human  basis,  and 
it  may  well  be  that  he  was  quite  right  for 
hating  an  author  who  was  all  author  and 
nothing  else.  He  could  not  have  hated 
Matthew  Arnold  on  that  score,  at  all 
events,  though  perhaps  he  might  have 
found  some  other  ground  for  gratifying  a 
feeling  very  dear  to  his  heart.  Mr.  Arnold 
was  many  other  things  as  well  as  a  poet,  so 
many  other  things  that  we  need  sometimes 
to  be  reminded  that  he  was  a  poet.  He 
allowed  himself  to  be  distracted  in  a  variety 
of  ways,  he  poured  himself  out  in  many 
strifes ;  though  not  exactly  eager,  he  was 
certainly  active.  He  discoursed  on  num- 
berless themes,  and  was  interested  in  many 
things  of  the  kind  usually  called  '  topics.' 


214  MATTHEW  ARNOLD 

Personally,  we  cannot  force  ourselves  to 
bewail  his  agility,  this  leaping  from  bough 
to  bough  of  the  tree  of  talk  and  discussion. 
It  argues  an  interest  in  things,  a  wide-eyed 
curiosity.  If  you  find  yourself  in  a  village 
fair  you  do  well  to  examine  the  booths,  and 
when  you  bring  your  purchases  home,  the 
domestic  authority  will  be  wise  not  to  scan 
too  severely  the  trivial  wares  never  meant 
to  please  a  critical  taste  or  to  last  a  lifetime. 
Mr.  Arnold  certainly  brought  home  some 
very  queer  things  from  his  village  fair,  and 
was  perhaps  too  fond  of  taking  them  for 
the  texts  of  his  occasional  discourses.  But 
others  must  find  fault,  we  cannot.  There 
is  a  pleasant  ripple  of  life  through  Mr.  Ar- 
nold's prose  writings.  His  judgments  are 
human  judgments.  He  did  not  care  for 
strange,  out-of-the-way  things ;  he  had  no 
odd  tastes.  He  drank  wine,  so  he  once 
said,  because  he  liked  it  —  good  wine,  that 
is.  And  it  was  the  same  with  poetry  and 
books.  He  liked  to  understand  what  he 
admired,  and  the  longer  it  took  him  to  un- 
derstand anything  the  less  disposed  he  was 
to  like  it.  Plain  things  suited  him  best. 
What  he  hated  most  was  the  far-fetched.  He 


MA  TTHE  W  ARNOLD  2  1 5 

had  the  greatest  respect  for  Mr.  Browning, 
and  was  a  sincere  admirer  of  much  of  his 
poetry,  but  he  never  made  the  faintest  at- 
tempt to  read  any  of  the  poet's  later  vol- 
umes. The  reason  probably  was  that  he 
could  not  be  bothered.  Hazlitt,  in  a  fine 
passage  descriptive  of  the  character  of  a 
scholar,  says  :  '  Such  a  one  lives  all  his  life 
*  in  a  dream  of  learning,  and  has  never  once 
'had  his  sleep  broken  by  a  real  sense  of 
'things.'  Mr.  Arnold  had  a  real  sense  of 
things.  The  writings  of  such  a  man  could 
hardly  fail  to  be  interesting,  whatever  they 
might  be  about,  even  the  burial  of  Dissent- 
ers or  the  cock  of  a  nobleman's  hat. 

But  for  all  that  we  are  of  those  who, 
when  we  name  the  name  of  Arnold,  mean 
neither  the  head-master  of  Rugby  nor  the 
author  of  Citlture  and  Anarchy  and  Litera- 
ture and  Dogma,  but  the  poet  who  sang, 
not,  indeed,  with  Wordsworth, '  The  wonder 
'  and  bloom  of  the  world,'  but  a  severer,  still 
more  truthful  strain,  a  life  whose  secret  is 
not  joy,  but  peace. 

Standing  on  this  high  breezy  ground,  we 
are  not  disposed  to  concede  anything  to 
the  enemy,  unless,  indeed,  it  be  one  some- 


2l6  MATTHEW  ARNOLD 

what  ill-defended  outpost  connected  with 
metre.  The  poet's  ear  might  have  been  a 
little  nicer.  Had  it  been  so,  he  would  have 
spared  his  readers  an  occasional  jar  and  a 
panegyric  on  Lord  Byron's  poetry.  There 
are,  we  know,  those  who  regard  this  out- 
post we  have  so  lightly  abandoned  as  the 
citadel.  These  rhyming  gentry  scout  what 
Arnold  called  the  terrible  sentence  passed 
on  a  French  poet  —  il  dit  tout  ce  qiiil  vent, 
mats  malheureusement  il  ria  rien  d  dire. 
They  see  nothing  terrible  in  a  sentence 
which  does  but  condemn  them  to  naked- 
ness. Thought  is  cumbersome.  You  skip 
best  with  nothing  on.  But  the  sober- 
minded  English  people  are  not  the  country- 
men of  Milton  and  Cowper,  of  Crabbe  and 
Wordsworth,  for  nothing.  They  like  poetry 
to  be  serious.  We  are  fond  of  sermons. 
We  may  quarrel  with  the  vicar's  five-and- 
twenty  minutes,  but  we  let  Carlyle  go  on 
for  twice  as  many  years,  and  until  he  had 
filled  thirty-four  octavo  volumes. 

The  fact  is  that,  though  Arnold  was  fond 
of  girding  at  the  Hebrew  in  us,  and  used  to 
quote  his  own  Christian  name  with  humor- 
ous resignation  as  only  an  instance  of  the 


MATTHEW  ARNOLD  2\J 

sort  of  thing  he  had  to  put  up  with,  he  was 
a  Puritan  at  heart,  and  would  have  been  as 
ill  at  ease  at  a  Greek  festival  as  Newman 
at  a  Spanish  auto  daf/. 

What  gives  Arnold's  verse  its  especial 
charm  is  his  grave  and  manly  sincerity. 
He  is  a  poet  without  artifice  or  sham.  He 
does  not  pretend  to  find  all  sorts  of  mean- 
ings in  all  sorts  of  things.  He  does  not 
manipulate  the  universe  and  present  his 
readers  with  any  bottled  elixir.  This  has 
been  cast  up  against  him  as  a  reproach. 
His  poetry,  so  we  have  been  told,  has  no 
consolation  in  it.  Here  is  a  doctor,  it  is 
said,  who  makes  up  no  drugs,  a  poet  who 
does  not  proclaim  that  he  sees  God  in  the 
avalanche  or  hears  Him  in  the  thunder. 
The  world  will  not,  so  we  are  assured,  hang 
upon  the  lips  of  one  who  bids  them  not  to 
be  too  sure  that  the  winds  are  wailing  man's 
secret  to  the  complaining  sea,  or  that  na- 
ture is  nothing  but  a  theme  for  poets. 
These  people  may  be  right.  In  any  event 
it  is  unwise  to  prophesy.  What  will  be,  will 
be.  Nobody  can  wish  to  be  proved  wrong. 
It  is  best  to  be  on  the  side  of  truth,  what- 
ever the  truth  may  be.  The  real  atheism 


21 8  MATTHEW  ARNOLD 

is  to  say,  as  men  are  found  to  do,  that  they 
would  sooner  be  convicted  of  error  they 
think  pleasing,  than  have  recognised  an  un- 
welcome truth  a  moment  earlier  than  its 
final  demonstration,  if,  indeed,  such  a  mo- 
ment should  ever  arrive  for  souls  so  craven. 
In  the  meantime,  this  much  is  plain,  that 
there  is  no  consolation  in  non-coincidence 
with  fact,  and  no  sweetness  which  does  not 
chime  with  experience.  Therefore,  those 
who  have  derived  consolation  from  Mr. 
Arnold's  noble  verse  may  take  comfort. 
Religion,  after  all,  observes  Bishop  Butler 
in  his  tremendous  way,  is  nothing  if  it  is 
not  true.  The  same  may  be  said  of  the 
poetry  of  consolation. 

The  pleasure  it  is  lawful  to  take  in  the 
truthfulness  of  Mr.  Arnold's  poetry  should 
not  be  allowed  to  lead  his  lovers  into  the 
pleasant  paths  of  exaggeration.  The  Muses 
dealt  him  out  their  gifts  with  a  somewhat 
niggardly  hand.  He  had  to  cultivate  his 
Sparta.  No  one  of  his  admirers  can  assert 
that  in  Arnold 

'  The  force  of  energy  is  found, 
And  the  sense  rises  on  the  wings  of  sound.' 

He  is  no  builder  of  the  lofty  rhyme.     This 


MATTHEW  ARNOLD  2IQ 

he  was  well  aware  of.  But  neither  had  he 
any  ample  measure  of  those  '  winged  fan- 
cies '  which  wander  at  will  through  the 
pages  of  Apollo's  favourite  children.  His 
strange  indifference  to  Shelley,  his  severity 
towards  Keats,  his  lively  sense  of  the  wan- 
tonness of  Shakespeare  and  the  Eliza- 
bethans, incline  us  to  the  belief  that  he 
was  not  quite  sensible  of  the  advantages 
of  a  fruitful  as  compared  with  a  barren 
soil.  His  own  crop  took  a  good  deal  of 
raising,  and  he  was  perhaps  somewhat  dis- 
posed to  regard  luxuriant  growths  with  dis- 
favour. 

But  though  severe  and  restricted,  and 
without  either  grandeur  or  fancy,  Arnold's 
poetry  is  most  companionable.  It  never 
teases  you  —  there  he  has  the  better  of 
Shelley  —  or  surfeits  you  —  there  he  pre- 
vails over  Keats.  As  a  poet,  we  would 
never  dare  or  wish  to  class  him  with  either 
Shelley  or  Keats,  but  as  a  companion  to 
slip  in  your  pocket  before  starting  to  spend 
the  day  amid 

'The  cheerful  silence  of  the  fells,' 

you  may  search  far  before  you  find  any- 


220  MATTHEW  ARNOLD 

thing  better  than  either  of  the  two  volumes 
of  Mr.  Arnold's  poems. 

His  own  enjoyment  of  the  open  air  is 
made  plain  in  his  poetry.  It  is  no  bor- 
rowed rapture,  no  mere  bookish  man's 
clumsy  joy  in  escaping  from  his  library, 
but  an  enjoyment  as  hearty  and  honest  as 
Izaak  Walton's.  He  has  a  quick  eye  for 
things,  and  rests  upon  them  with  a  quiet 
satisfaction.  No  need  to  give  instances  ; 
they  will  occur  to  all.  Sights  and  sounds 
alike  pleased  him  well.  So  obviously  gen- 
uine, so  real,  though  so  quiet,  was  his 
pleasure  in  our  English  lanes  and  dells, 
that  it  is  still  difficult  to  realise  that  his 
feet  can  no  longer  stir  the  cowslips  or  his 
ear  hear  the  cuckoo's  parting  cry. 

Amidst  the  melancholy  of  his  verse,  we 
detect  deep  human  enjoyment  and  an  hon- 
est human  endeavour  to  do  -the  best  he 
could  whilst  here  below.  The  best  he 
could  do  was,  in  our  opinion,  his  verse, 
and  it  is  a  comfort,  amidst  the  wreckage 
of  life,  to  believe  he  made  the  most  of  his 
gift,  cultivating  it  wisely  and  well,  and 
enriching  man's  life  with  some  sober,  seri- 
ous, and  beautiful  poetry.  We  are,  indeed, 


MATTHEW  ARNOLD  221 

glad  to  notice  that  there  is  to  be  a  new 
edition  of  Mr.  Arnold's  poems  in  one  vol- 
ume. It  will,  we  are  afraid,  be  too  stout 
for  the  pocket,  but  most  of  its  contents 
will  be  well  worth  lodgment  in  the  head. 
This  new  edition  will,  we  have  no  doubt 
whatever,  immensely  increase  the  number 
of  men  and  women  who  own  the  charm  of 
Arnold.  The  times  are  ripening  for  his 
poetry,  which  is  full  of  foretastes  of  the 
morrow.  As  we  read  we  are  not  carried 
back  by  the  reflection,  '  so  men  once 
'thought,'  but  rather  forward  along  the 
paths,  dim  and  perilous  it  may  be,  but 
still  the  paths  mankind  is  destined  to 
tread.  Truthful,  sober,  severe,  with  a  ca- 
pacity for  deep,  if  placid,  enjoyment  of  the 
pageant  of  the  world,  and  a  quick  eye  for 
its  varied  sights  and  an  eager  ear  for  its  de- 
lightful sounds,  Matthew  Arnold  is  a  poet 
whose  limitations  we  may  admit  without 
denying  his  right.  Our  passion  for  him  is 
a  loyal  passion  for  a  most  temperate  king. 
There  is  an  effort  on  his  brow,  we  must 
admit  it.  It  would  never  do  to  mistake 
his  poetry  for  what  he  called  the  best,  and 
which  he  was  ever  urging  upon  a  sluggish 


222  MAT 'THE W  ARNOLD 

populace.  It  intellectuaHses  far  too  much  ; 
its  method  is  a  known  method,  not  a  magi- 
cal one.  But  though  effort  may  be  on  his 
brow,  it  is  a  noble  effort  and  has  had  a 
noble  result. 

'  For  most  men  in  a  brazen  prison  live, 
Where  in  the  sun's  hot  eye, 
With  heads  bent  o'er  their  toil,  they  languidly 
Their  lives  to  some  unmeaning  task-work  give, 
Dreaming  of  nought  beyond  their  prison  wall. 
And  as,  year  after  year, 
Fresh  products  of  their  barren  labour  fall 
From  their  tired  hands,  and  rest 
Never  yet  comes  more  near, 
Gloom  settles  slowly  down  over  their  breast; 
And  while  they  try  to  stem 
The  waves  of  mournful  thought  by  which  they  are 

prest, 

Death  in  their  prison  reaches  them 
Unfreed,  having  seen  nothing,  still  unblest.' 

Or  if  not  a  slave  he  is  a  madman,  sailing 
ivhere  he  will  on  the  wild  ocean  of  life. 

'  And  then  the  tempest  strikes  him,  and  between 
The  lightning  bursts  is  seen 
Only  a  driving  wreck. 

And  the  pale  master  on  his  spar-strewn  deck, 
With  anguished  face  and  flying  hair, 
Grasping  the  rudder  hard, 

Still  bent  to  make  some  port  he  knows  not  where, 
Still  standing  for  some  false  impossible  shore; 


MATTHEW  ARNOLD  22$ 

And  sterner  comes  the  roar 

Of  sea  and  wind,  and  through  the  deepening  gloom 
Fainter  and  fainter  wreck  and  helmsman  loom, 
And  he  too  disappears  and  comes  no  more.' 

To  be  neither  a  rebel  nor  a  slave  is  the 
burden  of  much  of  Mr.  Arnold's  verse  — 
his  song  we  cannot  call  it.  It  will  be  long 
before  men  cease  to  read  their  Arnold  ; 
even  the  rebel  or  the  slave  will  occasion- 
ally find  a  moment  for  so  doing,  and  when 
he  does  it  may  be  written  of  him  : 

'  And  then  arrives  a  lull  in  the  hot  race 
Wherein  he  doth  for  ever  chase 
That  flying  and  illusive  shadow  Rest. 
An  air  of  coolness  plays  upon  his  face, 
And  an  unwonted  calm  pervades  his  breast, 
And  then  he  thinks  he  knows 
The  hills  where  his  life  rose 
And  the  sea  where  it  goes.' 


WILLIAM   HAZLITT 

FOR  an  author  to  fare  better  dead  than 
alive  is  good  proof  of  his  literary  vivacity 
and  charm.  The  rare  merit  of  Hazlitt's 
writing  was  recognised  in  his  lifetime  by 
good  judges,  but  his  fame  was  obscured 
by  the  unpopularity  of  many  of  his  opin- 
ions, and  the  venom  he  was  too  apt  to 
instil  into  his  personal  reminiscences.  He 
was  not  a  safe  man  to  confide  in.  He  had 
a  forked  crest  which  he  sometimes  lifted. 
Because  they  both  wrote  essays  and  were 
fond  of  the  Elizabethans,  it  became  the 
fashion  to  link  Hazlitt's  name  with  Lamb's. 
To  be  compared  with  the  incomparable  is 
hard  fortune.  Hazlitt  suffered  by  the 
comparison,  and  consequently  his  admirers, 
usually  in  those  early  days  men  of  keen 
wits  and  sharp  tongues,  grew  angry,  and 
infused  into  their  just  eulogiums  too  much 
of  Hazlitt's  personal  bitterness,  and  too 
little  of  his  wide  literary  sympathies. 
224 


WILLIAM  HAZLITT  22$ 

But  this  period  of  obscurity  is  now  over. 
No  really  good  thing  once  come  into  exis- 
tence and  remaining  so  is  ever  lost  to  the 
world.  This  is  most  comfortable  doctrine, 
and  true,  besides.  In  the  long  run  the 
world's  taste  is  infallible.  All  it  requires 
is  time.  How  easy  it  is  to  give  it  that ! 
Is  substantial  injustice  at  this  moment 
done  to  a  single  English  writer  of  prose 
or  verse  who  died  prior  to  the  ist  of  Janu- 
ary, 1 80 1  ?  Is  there  a  single  bad  author 
of  this  same  class  who  is  now  read  ?  Both 
questions  may  be  truthfully  answered  by 
a  joyful  shout  of,  No  !  This  fact  ought  to 
make  the  most  unpopular  of  living  authors 
the  sweetest-tempered  of  men.  The  sight 
of  your  rival  clinging  to  the  cob  he  has 
purchased  and  maintains  out  of  the  profits 
of  the  trashiest  of  novels  should  be  pleas- 
ant owing  to  the  reflection  that  both  rival 
and  cob  are  trotting  to  the  same  pit  of 
oblivion. 

But  humorous  as  is  the  prospect  of  the 
coming  occultation  of  personally  disagree- 
able authors,  the  final  establishment  of  the 
fame  of  a  dead  one  is  a  nobler  spectacle. 

William  Hazlitt  had  to  take  a  thrashing 


226  WILLIAM  HAZLITT 

from  life.  He  took  it  standing  up  like  a 
man,  not  lying  down  like  a  cur ;  but  take 
it  he  had  to  do.  He  died  on  September 
1 8,  1830,  tired  out,  discomfited,  defeated. 
Nobody  reviewing  the  facts  of  his  life  can 
say  that  it  was  well  spent.  There  is  noth- 
ing in  it  of  encouragement.  He  reaped 
what  he  sowed,  and  it  proved  a  sorry 
harvest.  When  he  lay  dying  he  wanted 
his  mother  brought  to  his  side,  but  she 
was  at  a  great  distance,  and  eighty-four 
years  of  age,  and  could  not  come.  Carlyle 
in  his  old  age,  grim,  worn,  and  scornful, 
said  once,  sorrowfully  enough,  'What  I 
'want  is  a  mother.'  It  is  indeed  an  excel- 
lent relationship. 

But  though  Hazlitt  got  the  worst  of  it  in 
his  personal  encounterwith  the  universe,  he 
nevertheless  managed  to  fling  down  before 
he  died  what  will  suffice  to  keep  his  name 
alive.  You  cannot  kill  merit.  We  are  all 
too  busily  engaged  struggling  with  dulness, 
our  own  and  other  people's,  and  with  en- 
nui ;  we  are  far  too  much  surrounded  by 
would-be  wits  and  abortive  thinkers,  ever  to 
forget  what  a  weapon  against  weariness  lies 
to  our  hand  in  the  works  of  Hazlitt,  who  is 


WILLIAM  HAZLITT  22/ 

as  refreshing  as  cold  water,  as  grateful  as 
shade. 

His  great  charm  consists  in  his  hearty 
reality.  Life  may  be  a  game,  and  all  its 
enjoyments  counters,  but  Hazlitt,  as  we 
find  him  in  his  writings  —  and  there  is  now 
no  need  to  look  for  him  anywhere  else  — 
played  the  game  and  dealt  out  the  counters 
like  a  man  bent  on  winning.  He  cared 
greatly  about  many  things.  His  admira- 
tion was  not  extravagant,  but  his  force  is 
great ;  in  fact,  one  may  say  of  him  as  he 
said  of  John  Cavanagh,  the  famous  fives 
player,  '  His  service  was  tremendous.'  In- 
deed, Hazlitt's  whole  description  of  Cava- 
nagh's  play  reminds  one  of  his  own  literary 
method  : 

'  His  style  of  play  was  as  remarkable  as 
'  his  power  of  execution.  He  had  no  affec- 
'  tation,  no  trifling.  He  did  not  throw  away 
'  the  game  to  show  off  an  attitude  or  try  an 
'  experiment.  He  was  a  fine,  sensible, 
'  manly  player,  who  did  what  he  could,  but 
'that  was  more  than  anyone  else  could 
'even  affect  to  do.  His  blows  were  not 
'  undecided  and  ineffectual,  lumbering  like 
'  Mr.  Wordsworth's  epic  poetry,  nor  waver- 


228  WILLIAM  HAZLITT 

'  ing  like  Mr.  Coleridge's  lyric  prose,  nor 
'  short  of  the  mark  like  Mr.  Brougham's 
'  speeches,  nor  wide  of  it  like  Mr.  Can- 
'  ning's  wit,  nor  foul  like  the  Quarterly, 
'  nor  let  balls  like  the  Edinburgh  Review' 

Wordsworth,  Coleridge,  Brougham,  Can- 
ning !  was  ever  a  fives  player  so  described 
before  ?  What  splendid  reading  it  makes  ! 
but  we  quote  it  for  the  purpose  of  apply- 
ing its  sense  to  Hazlitt  himself.  As  Cav- 
anagh  played,  so  Hazlitt  wrote. 

He  is  always  interesting,  and  always 
writes  about  really  interesting  things.  His 
talk  is  of  poets  and  players,  of  Shakespeare 
and  Kean,  of  Fielding  and  Scott,  of  Burke 
and  Cobbett,  of  prize  fights  and  Indian 
jugglers.  When  he  condescends  to  the 
abstract,  his  subjects  bring  an  appetite 
with  them.  The  Shyness  of  Scholars,  the 
Fear  of  Death,  the  Identity  of  an  Author 
with  his  Books,  Effeminacy  of  Character, 
the  Conversation  of  Lords,  On  Reading 
New  Books  :  the  very  titles  make  you  lick 
your  lips. 

Hazlitt  may  have  been  an  unhappy  man, 
but  he  was  above  the  vile  affectation  of 
pretending  to  see  nothing  in  life.  Had  he 


WILLIAM  HAZLITT  2  29 

not  seen  Mrs.  Siddons,  had  he  not  read 
Rousseau,  had  he  not  worshipped  Titian 
in  the  Louvre  ? 

No  English  writer  better  pays  the  debt 
of  gratitude  always  owing  to  great  poets, 
painters,  and  authors  than  Hazlitt ;  but  his 
is  a  manly,  not  a  maudlin,  gratitude.  No 
other  writer  has  such  gusto  as  he.  The 
glowing  passage  in  which  he  describes 
Titian's  St.  Peter  Martyr  almost  recalls 
the  canvas  uninjured  from  the  flames  which 
have  since  destroyed  it.  We  seem  to  see 
the  landscape  background,  '  with  that  cold 
'  convent  spire  rising  in  the  distance  amidst 
'the  blue  sapphire  mountains  and  the  golden 
'sky.'  His  essay  on  Sir  Walter  Scott  and 
the  Waverley  Novels  is  the  very  best  that 
has  ever  been  written  on  that  magnificent 
subject. 

As  a  companion  at  the  Feast  of  Wits 
commend  us  to  Hazlitt,  and  as  a  companion 
for  a  fortnight's  holiday  commend  us  to  the 
admirable  selection  recently  made  from  his 
works,  which  are  numerous  —  some  twenty 
volumes  —  by  Mr.  Ireland,  and  published 
at  a  cheap  price  by  Messrs.  F.  Warne  and 
Co.  The  task  of  selection  is  usually  a 


230  WILLIAM  HAZLITT 

thankless  one.  It  involves  of  necessity 
omission  and  frequently  curtailment.  It  is 
annoying  to  look  in  vain  for  some  favourite 
passage,  and  your  annoyance  prompts  the 
criticism  that  a  really  sound  judgment 
would  have  made  room  for  what  you  miss. 
We  lodge  no  complaint  against  Mr.  Ireland. 
Like  a  wise  man,  he  has  allowed  to  himself 
ample  space,  and  he  has  compiled  a  volume 
of  510  closely  though  well-printed  pages, 
which  has  only  to  be  read  in  order  to  make 
the  reader  well  acquainted  with  an  author 
whom  not  to  know  is  a  severe  mental  dep- 
rivation. 

Mr.  Ireland's  book  is  a  library  in  itself, 
and  a  marvellous  tribute  to  the  genius  of 
his  author.  It  seems  almost  incredible 
that  one  man  should  have  said  so  many 
good  things.  It  is  true  he  does  not  go 
very  deep  as  a  critic,  he  does  not  see  into 
the  soul  of  the  matter  as  Lamb  and  Cole- 
ridge occasionally  do  —  but  he  holds  you 
very  tight  —  he  grasps  the  subject,  he  en- 
joys it  himself  and  makes  you  do  so.  Per- 
haps he  does  say  too  many  good  things. 
His  sparkling  sentences  follow  so  quickly 
one  upon  another  that  the  reader's  appreci- 


WILLIAM  HAZLITT  2$l 

ation  soon  becomes  a  breathless  apprecia- 
tion. There  is  something  almost  uncanny 
in  such  sustained  cleverness.  This  impres- 
sion, however,  must  not  be  allowed  to  re- 
main as  a  final  impression.  In  Hazlitt  the 
reader  will  find  trains  of  sober  thought  pur- 
sued with  deep  feeling  and  melancholy. 
Turn  to  the  essays,  On  Living  to  Ones 
Self,  On  Going  a  Journey,  On  the  Feeling 
of  Immortality  in  Youth,  and  read  them 
over  again.  When  you  have  done  so  you 
will  be  indisposed  to  consider  their  author 
as  a  mere  sayer  of  good  things.  He  was 
much  more  than  that.  One  smiles  when, 
on  reading  the  first  Lord  Lytton's  Thoughts 
on  the  Genius  of  Hazlitt,  the  author  of 
Eugene  Aram,  is  found  declaring  that 
Hazlitt  '  had  a  keen  sense  of  the  Beautiful 
'  and  the  Subtle  ;  and  what  is  more,  he  was 
'deeply  imbued  with  sympathies  for  the 
'  Humane ' ;  but  when  Lord  Lytton  pro- 
ceeds, '  Posterity  will  do  him  justice,'  we 
cease  to  smile,  and  handling  Mr.  Ireland's 
book,  observe  with  deep  satisfaction,  'It 
'has.' 


THE    LETTERS   OF   CHARLES 
LAMB1 

FOUR  hundred  and  seventeen  letters  of 
Charles  Lamb's,  some  of  them  never  before 
published,  in  two  well-printed  but  handy 
volumes,  edited,  with  notes  illustrative, 
explanatory,  and  biographical,  by  Canon 
Ainger,  and  supplied  with  an  admirable 
index,  are  surely  things  to  be  thankful  for 
and  to  be  desired.  No  doubt  the  price  is 
prohibitory.  They  will  cost  you  in  cash, 
these  two  volumes,  full  as  they  are  from 
title-page  to  colophon  with  the  sweetness 
and  nobility,  the  mirth  and  the  melancholy 
of  their  author's  life,  touched  as  every 
page  of  them  is  with  traces  of  a  hard  fate 
bravely  borne,  seven  shillings  and  sixpence. 

1  Letters  of  Charles  Lamb.      Newly   arranged,  with 
additions  ;   and  a  New  Portrait.     Edited,  with  Introduc- 
tion and  Notes,  by  the  Rev.  Alfred  Ainger,  M.A.,  Canon 
of  Bristol.     2  vols.     London,  1888. 
232 


THE  LETTERS   OF  CHARLES  LAMB     233 

None  but  American  millionaires  and  fool- 
ish book-collectors  can  bear  such  a  strain 
upon  their  purses.  It  is  the  cab-fare  to 
and  from  a  couple  of  dull  dinner-parties. 
But  Mudie  is  in  our  midst,  ever  ready  to 
supply  our  very  modest  intellectual  wants 
at  so  much  a  quarter,  and  ward  off  the 
catastrophe  so  dreaded  by  all  dust-hating 
housewives,  the  accumulation  of  those 
'  nasty  books,'  for  which  indeed  but  slen- 
der accommodation  is  provided  in  our  up- 
holstered homes.  Yet  these  volumes,  how- 
ever acquired,  whether  by  purchase,  and 
therefore  destined  to  remain  by  your  side 
ready  to  be  handled  whenever  the  mood 
seizes  you,  or  borrowed  from  a  library  to 
be  returned  at  the  week's  end  along  with 
the  last  new  novel  people  are  painfully  talk- 
ing about,  cannot  fail  to  excite  the  interest 
and  stir  the  emotions  of  all  lovers  of  sound 
literature  and  true  men. 

But  first  of  all,  Canon  Ainger  is  to  be 
congratulated  on  the  completion  of  his 
task.  He  told  us  he  was  going  to  edit 
Lamb's  Works  and  Letters,  and  naturally 
one  believed  him ;  but  in  this  world  there 
is  nothing  so  satisfactory  as  performance. 


234      THE  LETTERS   OF  CHARLES  LAMB 

To  see  a  good  work  well  planned,  well 
executed,  and  entirely  finished  by  the 
same  hand  that  penned,  and  the  same 
mind  that  conceived  the  original  scheme, 
has  something  about  it  which  is  surpris- 
ingly gratifying  to  the  soul  of  man,  accus- 
tomed as  he  is  to  the  wreckage  of  projects 
and  the  failure  of  hopes. 

Canon  Ainger's  edition  of  Lamb's  Works 
and  Letters  stands  complete  in  six  volumes. 
Were  one  in  search  of  sentiment,  one  might 
perhaps  find  it  in  the  intimate  association 
existing  between  the  editor  and  the  old 
church  by  the  side  of  which  Lamb  was 
born,  and  which  he  ever  loved  and  ac- 
counted peculiarly  his  own.  Elia  was  born 
a  Templar. 

'  I  was  born  and  passed  the  first  seven 
'  years  of  my  life  in  the  Temple.  Its 
'  church,  its  halls,  its  gardens,  its  fountain, 
'  its  river,  I  had  almost  said  —  for  in  those 
'  young  years,  what  was  this  king  of  rivers 
'  to  me  but  a  stream  that  watered  our  pleas- 
'ant  places?  —  these  are  my  oldest  recol- 
'  lections.' 

Thus  begins  the  celebrated  essay  on 
'The  Old  Benchers  of  the  Inner  Temple.' 


THE  LETTERS   OF  CHARLES  LAMB     235 

As  a  humble  member  of  that  honourable 
Society,  I  rejoice  that  its  Reader  should 
be  the  man  who  has,  as  a  labour  of  love 
and  by  virtue  of  qualifications  which  can- 
not be  questioned,  placed  upon  the  library 
shelf  so  complete  and  choice  an  edition 
of  the  works  of  one  whose  memory  is  per- 
haps the  pleasantest  thing  about  the  whole 
place. 

So  far  as  these  two  volumes  of  letters 
are  concerned  the  course  adopted  by  the 
editor  has  been,  if  I  may  make  bold  to  say 
so,  the  right  one.  He  has  simply  edited 
them  carefully  and  added  notes  and  an 
index.  He  has  not  attempted  to  tell 
Lamb's  life  between  times.  He  has  al- 
ready told  the  story  of  that  life  in  a  sepa- 
rate volume.  I  wish  the  practice  could  be 
revived  of  giving  us  a  man's  correspondence 
all  by  itself  in  consecutive  volumes,  a«  we 
have  the  letters  of  Horace  Walpole,  of 
Burke,  of  Richardson,  of  Cowper,  and  many 
others.  It  is  astonishing  what  interesting 
and  varied  reading  such  volumes  make. 
They  never  tire  you.  You  do  not  stop  to 
be  tired.  Something  of  interest  is  always 
occurring.  Some  reference  to  a  place  you 


236      THE  LETTERS   OF  CHARLES  LAMB 

have  visited ;  to  a  house  you  have  stayed 
at ;  to  a  book  you  have  read  ;  to  a  man  or 
woman  you  wish  to  hear  about.  As  com- 
pared with  the  measured  malice  of  a  set 
biography,  where  you  feel  yourself  in  the 
iron  grasp,  not  of  the  man  whose  life  is 
being  professedly  written,  but  of  the  man 
(whom  naturally  you  dislike)  who  has  taken 
upon  himself  to  write  the  life,  these  volumes 
of  correspondence  have  all  the  ease  and 
grace  and  truthfulness  of  nature.  There 
is  about  as  much  resemblance  between 
reading  them  and  your  ordinary  biography, 
as  between  a  turn  on  the  treadmill  and  a 
saunter  into  Hertfordshire  in  search  of 
Mackery  End.  I  hope  when  we  get  hold 
of  the  biographies  of  Lord  Beaconsfield, 
and  Dean  Stanley,  we  shall  not  find  our- 
selves defrauded  of  our  dues.  But  it  is  of 
the  essence  of  letters  that  we  should  have 
the  whole  of  each.  I  think  it  wrong  to 
omit  even  the  merely  formal  parts.  They 
all  hang  together.  The  method  employed 
in  the  biography  of  George  Eliot  was,  in 
my  opinion — I  can  but  state  it — a  vicious 
method.  To  serve  up  letters  in  solid  slabs 
cut  out  of  longer  letters  is  distressing. 


THE  LETTERS   OF  CHARLES  LAMB     237 

Every  letter  a  man  writes  is  an  incriminat- 
ing document.  It  tells  a  tale  about  him. 
Let  the  whole  be  read  or  none. 

Canon  Ainger  has  adopted  the  right 
course.  He  has  indeed  omitted  a  few 
oaths  —  on  the  principle  that  '  damns  have 
'had  their  day.'  For  my  part,  I  think  I 
should  have  been  disposed  to  leave  them 
alone. 

'  The  rough  bur-thistle  spreading  wide 

Amang  the  bearded  bear, 
I  turn'd  my  weeding-clips  aside 
And  spared  the  symbol  dear.' 

But  this  is  not  a  question  to  discuss  with 
a  dignitary  of  the  Church.  Leaving  out 
the  oaths  and,  it  may  perhaps  be,  here  and 
there  a  passage  where  the  reckless  humour 
of  the  writer  led  him  to  transcend  the  limits 
of  becoming  mirth,  and  mere  notelets,  we 
have  in  these  two  volumes  Lamb's  letters 
just  as  they  were  written,  save  in  an 
instance  or  two  where  the  originals  have 
been  partially  destroyed.  The  first  is  to 
Coleridge,  and  is  dated  May  27,  1796 ;  the 
last  is  to  Mrs.  Dyer,  and  was  written  on 
December  22,  1834.  Who,  I  wonder,  ever 
managed  to  squeeze  into  a  correspondence 


238      THE  LETTERS   OF  CHARLES  LAMB 

of  forty  years  truer  humour,  madder  non- 
sense, sounder  sense,  or  more  tender  sym- 
pathy !  They  do  not  indeed  (these  letters) 
prate  about  first  principles,  but  they  con- 
tain many  things  conducive  to  a  good  life 
here  below. 

The  earlier  letters  strike  the  more  solemn 
notes.  As  a  young  man  Lamb  was  deeply 
religious,  and  for  a  time  the  appalling 
tragedy  of  his  life,  the  death  of  his  mother 
by  his  sister's  hand,  deepened  these  feel- 
ings. His  letters  to  Coleridge  in  Septem- 
ber and  October,  1769,  might  very  well 
appear  in  the  early  chapters  of  a  saint's 
life.  They  exhibit  the  rare  union  of  a 
colossal  strength,  entire  truthfulness,  (no 
single  emotion  being  ever  exaggerated,) 
with  the  tenderest  and  most  refined  feel- 
ings. Some  of  his  sentences  remind  one 
of  Johnson,  others  of  Rousseau.  How 
people  reading  these  letters  can  ever  have 
the  impudence  to  introduce  into  the  tones 
of  their  voices  when  they  are  referring  to 
Lamb  the  faintest  suspicion  of  condescen- 
sion, as  if  they  were  speaking  of  one 
weaker  than  themselves,  must  always  re- 


THE  LETTERS   OF  CHARLES  LAMB     239 

main  an  unsolved  problem  of  human  con- 
ceit. 

These  elevated  feelings  passed  away. 
He  refers  to  this  in  a  letter  written  in 
1 80 1  to  Walter  Wilson. 

'I  have  had  a  time  of  seriousness,  and 
'I  have  known  the  importance  and  reality 
'  of  a  religious  belief.  Latterly,  I  acknowl- 
'  edge,  much  of  my  seriousness  has  gone 
'  off,  whether  from  new  company  or  some 
'  other  new  associations,  but  I  still  retain 
'  at  bottom  a  conviction  of  the  truth  and  a 
'  certainty  of  the  usefulness  of  religion.' 

The  fact,  I  suspect,  was  that  the  strain 
of  religious  thoughts  was  proving  too 
great  for  a  brain  which  had  once  suc- 
cumbed to  madness.  Religion  sits  very 
lightly  on  some  minds.  She  could  not 
have  done  so  on  Lamb's.  He  took  refuge 
in  trivialities  seriously,  and  played  the 
fool  in  order  to  remain  sane. 

These  letters  are  of  the  same  material 
as  the  Essays  of  Elia.  The  germs,  nay, 
the  very  phrases,  of  the  latter  are  fre- 
quently to  be  found  in  the  former.  This 
does  not  offend  in  Lamb's  case,  though  as 
a  rule  a  good  letter  ought  not  forcibly  to 


240      THE  LETTERS   OF  CHARLES  LAMB 

remind  us  of  a  good  essay  by  the  same 
hand.  Admirable  as  are  Thackeray's  late- 
ly-published letters,  the  parts  I  like  best 
are  those  which  remind  me  least  of  a 
Roundabout  Paper.  The  author  is  always 
apt  to  steal  in,  and  the  author  is  the  very 
last  person  you  wish  to  see  in  a  letter. 
But  as  you  read  Lamb's  letters  you  never 
think  of  the  author :  his  personality  car- 
ries you  over  everything.  He  manages  — 
I  will  not  say  skilfully,  for  it  was  the 
natural  result  of  his  delightful  character, 
always  to  address  his  letter  to  his  corre- 
spondent —  to  make  it  a  thing  which,  apart 
from  the  correspondent,  his  habits  and 
idiosyncrasies,  could  not  possibly  have  ex- 
isted in  the  shape  it  does.  One  some- 
times comes  across  things  called  letters, 
which  might  have  been  addressed  to  any- 
body. But  these  things  are  not  letters : 
they  are  extracts  from  journals  or  circu- 
lars, and  are  usually  either  offensive  or 
dull. 

Lamb's  letters  are  not  indeed  model 
letters  like  Cowper's.  Though  natural  to 
Lamb,  they  cannot  be  called  easy.  'Di- 
'vine  chit-chat'  is  not  the  epithet  to  de- 


THE  LETTERS   OF  CHARLES  LAMB     24! 

scribe  them.  His  notes  are  all  high.  He 
is  sublime,  heartrending,  excruciatingly 
funny,  outrageously  ridiculous,  sometimes 
possibly  an  inch  or  two  overdrawn.  He 
carries  the  charm  of  incongruity  and  total 
unexpectedness  to  the  highest  pitch  im- 
aginable. John  Sterling  used  to  chuckle 
over  the  sudden  way  in  which  you  turn  up 
Adam  in  the  following  passage  from  a 
letter  to  Bernard  Barton  : 

'  DEAR  B.  B.  —  You  may  know  my  let- 
'  ters  by  the  paper  and  the  folding.  For 
'the  former  I  live  on  scraps  obtained  in 
'  charity  from  an  old  friend,  whose  station- 
'  ery  is  a  permanent  perquisite ;  for  folding 
'  I  shall  do  it  neatly  when  I  learn  to  tie  my 
'  neckcloths.  I  surprise  most  of  my  friends 
'  by  writing  to  them  on  ruled  paper,  as  if 
'  I  had  not  got  past  pot-hooks  and  hangers. 

*  Sealing-wax  I  have  none  in  my  establish- 
'  ment ;  wafers  of  the  coarsest  bran  supply 
'  its  place.     When  my  epistles  come  to  be 

*  weighed  with  Pliny's,  however  superior  to 
'them  in  Roman  delicate  irony,  judicious 
'reflections,  etc.,  his   gilt   post  will  bribe 
'over  the  judges  to  him.     All  the  time  I 
'was  at  the   E.  I.  H.  I  never  mended  a 


242      THE  LETTERS   OF  CHARLES  LAMB 

'  pen.  I  now  cut  'em  to  the  stumps,  mar- 
'ring  rather  than  mending  the  primitive 
'goose-quill.  I  cannot  bear  to  pay  for 
'  articles  I  used  to  get  for  nothing.  When 
'Adam  laid  out  his  first  penny  upon  non- 
'pareils  at  some  stall  in  Mesopotamos,  I 
'think  it  went  hard  with  him,  reflecting 
'  upon  his  old  goodly  orchard  where  he  had 
'so  many  for  nothing.' 

There  are  not  many  better  pastimes  for 
a  middle-aged  man  who  does  not  care  for 
first  principles  or  modern  novels  than  to 
hunt  George  Dyer  up-and-down  Charles 
Lamb.  Lamb  created  Dyer  as  surely  as 
did  Cervantes  Don  Quixote,  Sterne  Toby 
Shandy,  or  Charles  Dickens  Sam  Weller. 
Outside  Lamb  George  Dyer  is  the  deadest 
of  dead  authors.  Inside  Lamb  he  is  one 
of  the  quaintest,  queerest,  most  humor- 
ously felicitous  of  living  characters.  Pur- 
sue this  sport  through  Canon  Ainger's  first 
volume  and  you  will  have  added  to  your 
gallery  of  whimsicalities  the  picture  of 
George  Dyer  by  a  master-hand. 

Lamb's  relations  towards  Coleridge  and 
Wordsworth  are  exceedingly  interesting. 
He  loved  them  both  as  only  Lamb  could 


THE  LETTERS   OF  CHARLES  LAMB     243 

love  his  friends.  He  admired  them  both 
immensely  as  poets.  He  recognised  what 
he  considered  their  great  intellectual  su- 
periority over  himself.  He  considered 
their  friendship  the  crowning  glory  of  his 
life.  For  Coleridge  his  affection  reached 
devotion.  The  news  of  his  death  was  a 
shock  he  never  got  over.  He  would  keep 
repeating  to  himself,  '  Coleridge  is  dead  ! ' 
But  with  what  a  noble,  independent,  manly 
mind  did  he  love  his  friends  !  How  deep, 
how  shrewd  was  his  insight  into  their 
manifold  infirmities  !  His  masculine  na- 
ture and  absolute  freedom  from  that  curse 
of  literature,  coterieship,  stand  revealed 
on  every  page  of  the  history  of  Lamb's 
friendships. 

On  page  327  of  Canon  Ainger's  first 
volume  there  is  a  letter  of  Lamb's,  never 
before  printed,  addressed  to  his  friend  Man- 
ning, which  is  delightful  reading.  The 
editor  did  not  get  it  in  time  to  put  it  in  the 
text,  so  the  careless  reader  might  overlook 
it,  lurking  as  it  does  amongst  the  notes. 
It  is  too  long  for  quotation,  but  a  morsel 
must  be  allowed  me  : 

'I  lately  received  from  Wordsworth  a 


244      THE  LETTERS   OF  CHARLES  LAMB 

'  copy  of  the  second  volume,  accompanied 
'  by  an  acknowledgment  of  having  received 
'from  me  many  months  since  a  copy  of  a 
'  certain  tragedy  with  excuses  for  not  hav- 
'  ing  made  any  acknowledgment  sooner,  it 
'being  owing  to  an  almost  insurmount- 
'  able  aversion  from  letter-writing.  This 
'letter  I  answered  in  due  form  and  time, 
'  and  enumerated  several  of  the  passages 
'which  had  most  affected  me,  adding,  un- 
'  fortunately,  that  no  single  piece  had  moved 
'me  so  forcibly  as  the  Ancient  Mariner, 
'  The  Mad  Mother,  or  the  Lines  at  Tin- 
'  tern  Abbey.  The  Post  did  not  sleep  a 
'moment.  I  received  almost  instantane- 
'  ously  a  long  letter  of  four  sweating  pages 
'  from  my  Reluctant  Letter- Writer,  the  pur- 
'  port  of  which  was,  he  was  sorry  his  second 
'volume  had  not  given  me  more  pleasure 
'  (Devil  a  hint  did  I  give  that  it  had  not 
'pleased  me),  and  was  compelled  to  wish 
'  that  my  range  of  sensibility  was  more  ex- 
'  tended,  being  obliged  to  believe  that  I 
'  should  receive  large  influxes  of  happiness 
'  and  happy  thoughts  (I  suppose  from  the 
'Lyrical  Ballads}.  With  a  deal  of  stuff 
'  about  a  certain  union  of  Tenderness  and 


THE  LETTERS   OF  CHARLES  LAMB     24$ 

1  Imagination,  which  in  the  sense  he  used 
'  Imagination  was  not  the  characteristic  of 
'  Shakespeare,  but  which  Milton  possessed 
'in  a  degree  far  exceeding  other  Poets, 
'which  union,  as  the  highest  species  of 
'  Poetry  and  chiefly  deserving  that  name 
' "  he  was  most  proud  to  aspire  to  "  ;  then 
'illustrating  the  said  union  by  two  quota- 
'tions  from  his  own  second  volume  which 
'I  had  been  so  unfortunate  as  to  miss.' 

But  my  quotation  must  stop.  It  has 
been  long  enough  to  prove  what  I  was  say- 
ing about  the  independence  of  Lamb's 
judgment  even  of  his  best  friends.  No 
wonder  such  a  man  did  not  like  being 
called  'gentle-hearted  '  even  by  S.  T.  C.,  to 
whom  he  writes  : 

'  In  the  next  edition  of  the  Anthology 
'  (which  Phoebus  avert,  those  nine  other 
'wandering  maids  also  !)  please  to  blot  out 
'"gentle-hearted,"  and  substitute  drunken 
'dog,  ragged  head,  seld-shaven,  odd-eyed, 
'stuttering,  or  any  other  epithet  which 
'  truly  and  properly  belongs  to  the  gentle- 
'man  in  question.' 

Of  downright  fun  and  fooling  of  the 
highest  intellectual  calibre  fine  examples 


246      THE  LETTERS  OF  CHARLES  LAMB 

abound  on  all  sides.  The  '  Dick  Hopkins  ' 
letter  ranks  very  high.  Manning  had  sent 
Lamb  from  Cambridge  a  piece  of  brawn, 
and  Lamb  takes  into  his  head,  so  teeming 
with  whimsical  fancies,  to  pretend  that  it 
had  been  sent  him  by  an  imaginary  Dick 
Hopkins,  'the  swearing  scullion  of  Caius,' 
who  '  by  industry  and  agility  has  thrust 
'himself  into  the  important  situation  (no 
'sinecure,  believe  me)  of  cook  to  Trinity 
'  Hall ' ;  and  accordingly  he  writes  the  real 
donor  a  long  letter,  singing  the  praises  of 
this  figment  of  his  fancy,  and  concludes  : 
'Do  me  the  favour  to  leave  off  the  busi- 
'ness  which  you  may  be  at  present  upon, 
'  and  go  immediately  to  the  kitchens  of 
'Trinity  and  Caius  and  make  my  most  re- 
'spectful  compliments  to  Mr.  Richard 
'  Hopkins  and  assure  him  that  his  brawn 
'is  most  excellent:  and  that  I  am  more- 
'  over  obliged  to  him  for  his  innuendo  about 
'  salt  water  and  bran,  which  I  shall  not  fail 
'  to  improve.  I  leave  it  to  you  whether 
'you  shall  choose  to  pay  him  the  civility  of 
'  asking  him  to  dinner  while  you  stay  in 
'Cambridge,  or  in  whatever  other  way  you 
'may  best  like  to  show  your  gratitude  to 


THE  LETTERS   OF  CHARLES  LAMB     24? 

' my  friend.  Richard  Hopkins  considered 
'  in  many  points  of  view  is  a  very  extraor- 
'  dinary  character.  Adieu.  I  hope  to  see 
'you  to  supper  in  London  soon,  where  we 
'will  taste  Richard's  brawn,  and  drink  his 
'  health  in  a  cheerful  but  moderate  cup. 
'  We  have  not  many  such  men  in  any  rank 
'  of  life  as  Mr.  R.  Hopkins.  Crisp,  the 
'barber  of  St.  Mary's,  was  just  such  an- 
'  other.  I  wonder  he  never  sent  me  any 
'little  token,  some  chestnuts  or  a  puff,  or 
'  two  pound  of  hair ;  just  to  remember  him 
'by.' 

We  have  little  such  elaborate  jesting 
nowadays.  I  suppose  we  think  it  is  not 
worth  the  trouble,  The  Tartary  letter  to 
Manning  and  the  rheumatism  letters  to 
Crabb  Robinson  are  almost  distractingly 
provocative  of  deep  internal  laughter.  The 
letter  to  Gary  apologising  for  the  writer's 
getting  drunk  in  the  British  Museum  has 
its  sad  side ;  but  if  one  may  parody  the 
remark,  made  by  'the  young  lady  of  qual- 
'  ity,'  to  Dr.  Johnson,  which  he  was  so  fond 
of  getting  Boswell  to  repeat,  though  it  was 
to  the  effect  that  had  he  (our  great  moral- 
ist) been  born  out  of  wedlock  his  genius 


248      THE  LETTERS  OF  CHARLES  LAMB 

would  have  been  his  mother's  excuse,  it 
may  be  said  that  such  a  letter  as  Lamb's 
was  ample  atonement  for  his  single  frailty. 

Lamb  does  not  greatly  indulge  in  sar- 
casm, though  nobody  could  say  more  thor- 
oughly ill-natured  things  than  he  if  he 
chose  to  do  so.  George  Dawe,  the  Royal 
Academician,  is  roughly  used  by  him.  The 
account  he  gives  of  Miss  Berger  —  Benjay 
he  calls  her  —  is  not  lacking  in  spleen.  But 
as  a  rule  if  Lamb  disliked  a  person  he 
damned  him  and  passed  on.  He  did  not 
stop  to  elaborate  his  dislikes,  or  to  toss  his 
hatreds  up  and  down,  as  he  does  his  loves 
and  humorous  fancies.  He  hated  the  sec- 
ond Mrs.  Godwin  with  an  entire  hatred. 
In  a  letter  written  to  Manning  when  in 
China  he  says : 

'Mrs.  Godwin  grows  every  day  in  dis- 
'  favour  with  me.  I  will  be  buried  with 
'this  inscription  over  me:  "Here  lies  C. 
' "  L.,  the  woman  hater "  :  I  mean  that 
'hated  one  woman  ;  for  the  rest  God  bless 
'  them  !  How  do  you  like  the  Mandarin- 
'  esses  ?  Are  you  on  some  little  footing 
'  with  any  of  them  ? ' 

Scattered  up  and  down  these  letters  are 


THE  LETTERS   OF  CHARLES  LAMB     249 

to  be  found  golden  sentences,  criticisms 
both  of  life  and  of  books,  to  rival  which 
one  would  have  far  to  go.  He  has  not  the 
glitter  of  Hazlitt  —  a  writer  whom  it  is  a 
shame  to  depreciate ;  nor  does  he  ever 
make  the  least  pretence  of  aspiring  to  the 
chair  of  Coleridge.  He  lived  all  his  life 
through  conscious  of  a  great  weakness,  and 
therein  indeed  lay  the  foundation  of  the 
tower  of  his  strength.  '  You  do  not  know,' 
he  writes  to  Godwin,  '  how  sore  and  weak 
'a  brain  I  have,  or  you  would  allow  for 
'  many  things  in  me  which  you  set  down 
'for  whims.'  Lamb  apologising  for  him- 
self to  Godwin  is  indeed  a  thing  at  which 
the  imagination  boggles.  But  his  humility 
must  not  blind  us  to  the  fact  that  there  are 
few  men  from  whom  we  can  learn  more. 

The  most  striking  note  of  Lamb's  liter- 
ary criticism  is  its  veracity.  He  is  perhaps 
never  mistaken.  His  judgments  are  apt  to 
be  somewhat  too  much  coloured  with  his 
own  idiosyncrasy  to.be  what  the  judicious 
persons  of  the  period  call  final  and  classical, 
but  when  did  he  ever  go  utterly  wrong 
either  in  praise  or  in  dispraise  ?  When  did 
he  like  a  book  which  was  not  a  good  book? 


250      THE  LETTERS   OF  CHARLES  LAMB 

When  did  either  the  glamour  of  antiquity 
or  the  glare  of  novelty  lead  him  astray  ? 
How  free  he  was  from  that  silly  chatter 
about  books  now  so  abundant !  When  did 
he  ever  pronounce  wire-drawn  twaddle  or 
sickly  fancies,  simply  reeking  of  their  im- 
pending dissolution,  to  be  enduring  and 
noble  workmanship  ? 

But  it  must  be  owned  Lamb  was  not  a 
great  reader  of  new  books.  That  task  de- 
volved upon  his  sister.  He  preferred  Bur- 
net's  History  of  his  Own  Times,  to  any 
novel,  even  to  a  'Waverley.' 

'  Did  you  ever  read,'  he  wrote  to  Man- 
ning, 'that  garrulous,  pleasant  history? 
'He  tells  his  story  like  an  old  man  past 
'political  service,  bragging  to  his  sons  on 
'  winter  evenings  of  the  part  he  took  in  pub- 
'lic  transactions,  when  his  "old  cap  was 
' "  new."  Full  of  scandal,  which  all  true  his- 
'  tory  is.  No  palliatives  ;  but  all  the  stark 
'  wickedness,  that  actually  gives  the  momen- 
tum to  national  actors.  Quite  the  prattle 
'of  age  and  outlived  importance.  Truth 
'and  sincerity  staring  out  upon  you  in 
'alto  relievo.  Himself  a  party  man,  he 
'makes  you  a  party  man.  None  of  the 


THE  LETTERS   OF  CHARLES  LAMB     2$I 

'cursed,  philosophical,  Humeian  indiffer- 
'  ence,  so  cold  and  unnatural  and  inhuman. 
'  None  of  the  cursed  Gibbonian  fine  writing 
'  so  fine,  and  composite !  None  of  Dr. 
'  Robertson's  periods  with  three  members. 
'  None  of  Mr.  Roscoe's  sage  remarks,  all  so 
'  apposite  and  coming  in  so  clever,  lest  the 
'  reader  should  have  had  the  trouble  of  draw- 
'  ing  an  inference.' 

On  the  subject  of  children's  books  Lamb 
held  strong  opinions,  as  indeed  he  was  en- 
titled to  do.  What  married  pair  with  their 
quiver  full  ever  wrote  such  tales  for  chil- 
dren as  did  this  old  bachelor  and  his  maiden 
sister  ? 

'I  am  glad  the  snuff  and  Pipos  books 
'please.  Goody  Two  Shoes  is  almost  out 
'  of  print.  Mrs.  Barbauld's  stuff  has  ban- 
'  ished  all  the  old  classics  of  the  nursery, 
'and  the  shop-man  at  Newberry's  hardly 
'  deigned  to  reach  them  off  an  old  exploded 
'corner  of  a  shelf  when  Mary  asked  for 
'them.  Mrs.  Barbauld's  and  Mrs.  Trim- 
'  mer's  nonsense  lay  in  piles  about.  Knowl- 
'  edge  insignificant  and  vapid  as  Mrs.  Bar- 
'  bauld's  books  convey,  it  seems  must  come 
1  to  a  child  in  the  shape  of  knowledge,  and 


252      THE  LETTERS  OF  CHARLES  LAMB 

'  his  empty  noddle  must  be  turned  with  con- 
'  ceit  of  his  own  powers  when  he  has  learnt 
'  that  a  horse  is  an  animal,  and  Billy  is  bet- 
'  ter  than  a  horse,  and  such  like  —  instead 
'  of  that  beautiful  interest  in  wild  tales  which 
'  made  the  child  a  man,  while  all  the  time  he 
'suspected  himself  to  be  no  bigger  than  a 
'child.' 

Canon  Ainger's  six  volumes  are  not  very 
big.  They  take  up  but  little  room.  They 
demand  no  great  leisure.  But  they  cannot 
fail  to  give  immense  pleasure  to  genera- 
tions to  come,  to  purify  tastes,  to  soften 
hearts,  to  sweeten  discourse. 


AUTHORS   IN   COURT 

THERE  is  always  something  a  little  ludi- 
crous about  the  spectacle  of  an  author  in 
pursuit  of  his  legal  remedies.  It  is  hard 
to  say  why,  but  like  a  sailor  on  horseback, 
or  a  Quaker  at  the  play,  it  suggests  that 
incongruity  which  is  the  soul  of  things 
humorous.  The  courts  are  of  course  as 
much  open  to  authors  as  to  the  really 
deserving  members  of  the  community ; 
and,  to  do  the  writing  fraternity  justice, 
they  have  seldom  shown  any  indisposition 
to  enter  into  them  —  though  if  they  have 
done  so  joyfully,  it  must  be  attributed  to 
their  natural  temperament,  which  (so  we 
read)  is  easy,  rather  than  to  the  mirthful 
character  of  legal  process. 

To  write  a  history  of  the  ligitations  in 
which  great  authors  have  been  engaged 
would  indeed  be  reno-vare  dolorem,  and  is 
no  intention  of  mine ;  though  the  subject 

253 


254  AUTHORS  IN  COURT 

is   not  destitute  of   human  interest  —  in- 
deed, quite  the  opposite. 

Great  books  have  naturally  enough, 
being  longer  lived,  come  into  court  even 
more  frequently  than  great  authors.  Para- 
dise Lost,  The  Whole  Duty  of  Man,  The 
Pilgrim's  Progress,  Thomson's  Seasons, 
Rasselas,  all  have  a  legal  as  well  as  a  liter- 
ary history.  Nay,  Holy  Writ  herself  has 
raised  some  nice  points.  The  king's  ex- 
clusive prerogative  to  print  the  authorised 
version  has  been  based  by  some  lawyers 
on  the  commercial  circumstance  that  King 
James  paid  for  it  out  of  his  own  pocket. 
Hence,  argued  they,  cunningly  enough,  it 
became  his,  and  is  now  his  successor's. 
Others  have  contended  more  strikingly 
that  the  right  of  multiplying  copies  of  the 
Scriptures  necessarily  belongs  to  the  king 
as  head  of  the  Church.  A  few  have  been 
found  to  question  the  right  altogether,  and 
to  call  it  a  job.  As  her  present  gracious 
Majesty  has  been  pleased  to  abandon  the 
prerogative,  and  has  left  all  her  subjects 
free  (though  at  their  own  charges)  to  pub- 
lish the  version  of  her  learned  predecessor, 
the  Bible  does  not  now  come  into  court  on 


AUTHORS  IN  COURT  255 

its  own  account.  But  whilst  the  preroga- 
tive was  enforced,  the  king's  printers  were 
frequently  to  be  found  seeking  injunctions 
to  restrain  the  vending  of  the  Word  of 
God  by  (to  use  Carlyle's  language)  '  Mr. 
'  Thomas  Teggs  and  other  extraneous  per- 
'sons.'  Nor  did  the  judges,  on  proper 
proof,  hesitate  to  grant  what  was  sought. 
It  is  perhaps  interesting  to  observe  that  the 
king  never  claimed  more  than  the  text.  It 
was  always  open  to  anybody  to  publish  even 
King  James's  version,  if  he  added  notes 
of  his  own.  But  how  shamefully  was  this 
royal  indulgence  abused!  Knavish  book- 
sellers, anxious  to  turn  a  dishonest  penny 
out  of  the  very  Bible,  were  known  to  pub- 
lish Bibles  with  so-called  notes,  which  upon 
examination  turned  out  not  to  be  bond-fide 
notes  at  all,  but  sometimes  mere  indications 
of  assent  with  what  was  stated  in  the  text, 
and  sometimes  simple  ejaculations.  And 
as  people  as  a  rule  preferred  to  be  without 
notes  of  this  character  they  used  to  be 
thoughtfully  printed  at  the  very  edge  of 
the  sheet,  so  that  the  scissors  of  the  binder 
should  cut  them  off  and  prevent  them 
annoying;  the  reader.  But  one  can  fancy 


256  AUTHORS  IN  COURT 

the  question,  '  What  is  a  bond-fide  note  ? ' 
exercising  the  legal  mind. 

Our  great  lawyers  on  the  bench  have 
always  treated  literature  in  the  abstract 
with  the  utmost  respect.  They  have  in 
many  cases  felt  that  they  too,  but  for  the 
grace  of  God,  might  have  been  authors. 
Like  Charles  Lamb's  solemn  Quaker,  'they 
'had  been  wits  in  their  youth.'  Lord  Mans- 
field never  forgot  that,  according  to  Mr. 
Pope,  he  was  a  lost  Ovid.  Before  ideas  in 
their  divine  essence  the  judges  have  bowed 
down.  'A  literary  composition,'  it  has 
been  said  by  them,  '  so  long  as  it  lies  dor- 
'mant  in  the  author's  mind,  is  absolutely 
'in  his  own  possession.'  Even  Mr.  Hora- 
tio Sparkins,  of  whose  brilliant  table-talk 
this  observation  reminds  us,  could  not 
more  willingly  have  recognised  an  obvious 
truth. 

But  they  have  gone  much  further  than 
this.  Not  only  is  the  repose  of  the  dor- 
mant idea  left  undisturbed,  but  the  manu- 
script to  which  it,  on  ceasing  to  be  dor- 
mant, has  been  communicated,  is  hedged 
round  with  divinity.  It  would  be  most 
unfair  to  the  delicacy  of  the  legal  mind  to 


AUTHORS  IN  COURT 

attribute  this  to  the  fact,  no  doubt  notori- 
ous, that  whilst  it  is  easy  (after,  say,  three 
years  in  a  pleader's  chambers)  to  draw 
an  indictment  against  a  man  for  stealing 
paper,  it  is  not  easy  to  do  so  if  he  has  only 
stolen  the  ideas  and  used  his  own  paper. 
There  are  some  quibbling  observations  in 
the  second  book  of  Justinian's  Institutes, 
and  a  few  remarks  of  Lord  Coke's  which 
might  lead  the  thoughtless  to  suppose  that 
in  their  protection  of  an  author's  manu- 
scripts the  courts  were  thinking  more  of 
the  paper  than  of  the  words  put  upon  it ; 
but  that  this  is  not  so  clearly  appears  from 
our  law  as  it  is  administered  in  the  Bank- 
ruptcy branch  of  the  High  Court. 

Suppose  a  popular  novelist  were  to  be- 
come a  bankrupt  —  a  supposition  which, 
owing  to  the  immense  sums  these  gentle- 
men are  now  known  to  make,  is  robbed  of 
all  painfulness  by  its  impossibility  —  and 
his  effects  were  found  to  consist  of  the 
three  following  items  :  first,  his  wearing 
apparel ;  second,  a  copy  of  Whitaker's 
Almanack  for  the  current  year  ;  and  third, 
the  manuscript  of  a  complete  and  hitherto 
unpublished  novel,  worth  in  the  Row,  let 


258  AUTHORS  IN  COURT 

us  say,  one  thousand  pounds.  These  are 
the  days  of  cash  payments,  so  we  must  not 
state  the  author's  debts  at  more  than  fifteen 
hundred  pounds.  It  would  have  been  diffi- 
cult for  him  to  owe  more  without  incurring 
the  charge  of  imprudence.  Now,  how  will 
the  law  deal  with  the  effects  of  this  bank- 
rupt ?  Ever  averse  to  exposing  anyone  to 
criminal  proceedings,  it  will  return  to  him 
his  clothing,  provided  its  cash  value  does 
not  exceed  twenty  pounds,  which,  as  authors 
have  left  off  wearing  bloom-coloured  gar- 
ments even  as  they  have  left  off  writing 
Vicars  of  Wakefield,  it  is  not  likely  to  do. 
This  humane  rule  disposes  of  item  number 
one.  As  to  Whitakers  Almanack,  it  would 
probably  be  found  necessary  to  take  the 
opinion  of  the  court ;  since,  if  it  be  a  tool 
of  the  author's  trade,  it  will  not  vest  in  the 
official  receiver  and  be  divisible  amongst 
the  creditors,  but,  like  the  first  item,  will 
remain  the  property  of  the  bankrupt  — 
but  otherwise,  if  not  such  a  tool.  On  a 
point  like  this  the  court  would  probably 
wish  to  hear  the  evidence  of  an  expert  — 
of  some  man  like  Mr.  George  Augustus 
Sala,  who  knows  the  literary  life  to  the 


AUTHORS  IN  COURT 

backbone.  This  point  disposed  of,  or 
standing  over  for  argument,  there  remains 
the  manuscript  novel,  which,  as  we  have 
said,  would,  if  sold  in  the  Row,  produce  a 
sum  not  only  sufficient  to  pay  the  costs  of 
the  argument  about  the  Almanack  and  of 
all  parties  properly  appearing  in  the  bank- 
ruptcy, but  also,  if  judiciously  handled,  a 
small  dividend  to  the  creditors.  But  here 
our  law  steps  in  with  its  chivalrous,  almost 
religious  respect  for  ideas,  and  declares 
that  the  manuscript  shall  not  be  taken 
from  the  bankrupt  and  published  without 
his  consent.  In  ordinary  cases  everything 
a  bankrupt  has,  save  the  clothes  for  his 
back  and  the  tools  of  his  trade,  is  ruth- 
lessly torn  from  him.  Be  it  in  possession, 
reversion,  or  remainder,  it  all  goes.  His 
incomes  for  life,  his  reversionary  hopes,  are 
knocked  down  to  the  speculator.  In  vul- 
gar phrase,  he  is  'cleaned  out.'  But  the 
manuscripts  of  the  bankrupt  author,  albeit 
they  may  be  worth  thousands,  are  not  rec- 
ognised as  property  ;  they  are  not  yet  dedi- 
cate to  the  public.  The  precious  papers, 
despite  all  their  writer's  misfortunes,  re- 
main his  —  his  to  croon  and  to  dream  over, 


260  AUTHORS  IN  COURT 

his  to  alter  and  re-transcribe,  his  to  with- 
hold, ay,  his  to  destroy,  if  he  should  deem 
them,  either  in  calm  judgment,  or  in  a 
despairing  hour,  unhappy  in  their  expres- 
sion or  unworthy  of  his  name. 

There  is  something  positively  tender  in 
this  view.  The  law  may  be  an  ass,  but  it 
is  also  a  gentleman. 

Of  course,  in  my  imaginary  case,  if  the 
bankrupt  were  to  withhold  his  consent  to 
publication,  his  creditors,  even  though  it 
were  held  that  the  Almanack  was  theirs, 
would  get  nothing.  I  can  imagine  them 
grumbling,  and  saying  (what  will  not  credit- 
ors say?) :  'We  fed  this  gentleman  whilst 
*  he  was  writing  this  precious  manuscript. 
'  Our  joints  sustained  him,  our  bread  filled 
'him,  our  wine  made  him  merry.  Without 
'  our  goods  he  must  have  perished.  By  all 
'  legal  analogies  we  ought  to  have  a  lien 
'  upon  that  manuscript.  We  are  wholly 
'indifferent  to  the  writer's  reputation.  It 
'may  be  blasted  for  all  we  care.  It  was 
'not  as  an  author  but  as  a  customer 
'  that  we  supplied  his  very  regular  wants. 
'  It  is  now  our  turn  to  have  wants.  We 
'  want  to  be  paid.' 


AUTHORS  IN  COURT  261 

These  amusing,  though  familiar,  cries  of 
distress  need  not  disturb  our  equanimity  or 
interfere  with  our  admiration  for  the  sub- 
lime views  as  to  the  sanctity  of  unpublished 
ideas  entertained  by  the  Court  sitting  in 
Bankruptcy. 

We  have  thus  found,  so  far  as  we  have 
gone,  the  profoundest  respect  shown  by  the 
law  both  for  the  dormant  ideas  and  the 
manuscripts  of  the  author.  Let  us  now 
push  boldly  on,  and  inquire  what  happens 
when  the  author  withdraws  his  interdict, 
takes  the  world  into  his  confidence,  and 
publishes  his  book. 

Our  old  Common  Law  was  clear  enough. 
Subject  only  to  laws  or  customs  about 
licensing  and  against  profane  books  and 
the  like,  the  right  of  publishing  and  selling 
any  book  belonged  exclusively  to  the  au- 
thor and  persons  claiming  through  him. 
Books  were  as  much  the  subjects  of  prop- 
erty-rights as  lands  in  Kent  or  money  in 
the  bank.  The  term  of  enjoyment  knew 
no  period.  Fine  fantastic  ideas  about 
genius  endowing  the  world  and  transcend- 
ing the  narrow  bounds  of  property  were  not 
countenanced  by  our  Common  Law.  Bun- 


262  AUTHORS  IN  COURT 

yan's  Pilgrims  Progress,  in  the  year  1680, 
belonged  to  Mr.  Ponder  :  Paradise  Lost,  in 
the  year  1739,  was  the  property  of  Mr. 
Jacob  Tonson.  Mr.  Ponder  and  Mr.  Ton- 
son  had  acquired  these  works  by  purchase. 
Property-rights  of  this  description  seem 
strange  to  us,  even  absurd.  But  that  is 
one  of  the  provoking  ways  of  property- 
rights.  Views  vary.  Perhaps  this  time 
next  century  it  will  seem  as  absurd  that 
Ben  Mac  Dhui  should  ever  have  been 
private  property  as  it  now  does  that  in 
1739  Mr.  Tonson  should  have  been  the 
owner  '  of  man's  first  disobedience  and  the 
'fruit  of  that  forbidden  tree.'  This  is  not 
said  with  any  covered  meaning,  but  is 
thrown  out  gloomily  with  the  intention  of 
contributing  to  the  general  depreciation  of 
property. 

If  it  be  asked  how  came  it  about  that 
authors  and  booksellers  allowed  them- 
selves to  be  deprived  of  valuable  and  well- 
assured  rights — to  be  in  fact  disinherited, 
without  so  much  as  an  expostulatory  ode 
or  a  single  epigram  —  it  must  be  an- 
swered, strange  as  it  may  sound,  it  hap« 


AUTHORS  IN  COURT  263 

pened  accidentally  and  through  tampering 
with  the  Common  Law. 

Authors  are  indeed  a  luckless  race.  To 
be  deprived  of  your  property  by  Act  of 
Parliament  is  a  familiar  process,  calling 
for  no  remarks  save  of  an  objurgatory 
character ;  but  to  petition  Parliament  to 
take  away  your  property  —  to  get  up  an 
agitation  against  yourself,  to  promote  the 
passage  through  both  Houses  of  the  Act 
of  spoliation,  is  unusual ;  so  unusual  in- 
deed that  I  make  bold  to  say  that  none 
but  authors  would  do  such  things.  That 
they  did  these  very  things  is  certain.  It 
is  also  certain  that  they  did  not  mean  to 
do  them.  They  did  not  understand  the 
effect  of  their  own  Act  of  Parliament.  In 
exchange  for  a  term  of  either  fourteen  or 
twenty-one  years,  they  gave  up  not  only 
for  themselves,  but  for  all  before  and  after 
them,  the  whole  of  time.  Oh !  miserable 
men !  No  enemy  did  this ;  no  hungry 
mob  clamoured  for  cheap  books  ;  no  owner 
of  copyrights  so  much  as  weltered  in  his 
gore.  The  rights  were  unquestioned  :  no 
one  found  fault  with  them.  The  authors 
accomplished  their  own  ruin.  Never, 


264  AUTHORS  IN  COURT 

surely,  since  the  well-nigh  incredible  folly 
of  our  first  parents  lost  us  Eden  and  put 
us  to  the  necessity  of  earning  our  living, 
was  so  fine  a  property —  perpetual  copy- 
right— bartered  away  for  so  paltry  an 
equivalent. 

This  is  how  it  happened.  Before  the 
Revolution  of  1688  printing  operations 
were  looked  after,  first  by  the  Court  of 
Star  Chamber,  which  was  not  always  en- 
gaged, as  the  perusal  of  constitutional  his- 
tory might  lead  one  to  believe,  in  torturing 
the  unlucky,  and  afterwards  by  the  Sta- 
tioners' Company.  Both  these  jurisdic- 
tions revelled  in  what  is  called  summary 
process,  which  lawyers  sometimes  describe 
as  brevi  manu,  and  suitors  as  'short 
'shrift.'  They  hailed  before  them  the 
Mr.  Thomas  Teggs  of  the  period,  and 
fined  them  heavily  and  confiscated  their 
stolen  editions.  Authors  and  their  as- 
signees liked  this.  But  then  came  Dutch 
William  and  the  glorious  Revolution.  The 
press  was  left  free ;  and  authors  and  their 
assignees  were  reduced  to  the  dull  level  of 
unlettered  persons ;  that  is  to  say,  if  their 
rights  were  interfered  with,  they  were 


AUTHORS  IN  COURT  26$ 

compelled  to  bring  an  action,  of  the  kind 
called  'trespass  on  the  case,'  and  to  em- 
ploy astute  counsel  to  draw  pleadings  with 
a  pitfall  in  each  paragraph,  and  also  to 
incur  costs  ;  and  in  most  cases,  even  when 
they  triumphed  over  their  enemy,  it  was 
only  to  find  him  a  pauper  from  whom  it 
was  impossible  to  recover  a  penny.  Nor 
had  the  law  power  to  fine  the  offender  or 
to  confiscate  the  pirated  edition ;  or  if  it 
had  this  last  power,  it  was  not  accustomed 
to  exercise  it,  deeming  it  unfamiliar  and 
savouring  of  the  Inquisition.  Grub  Street 
grew  excited.  A  noise  went  up  'most 
'  musical,  most  melancholy, 

'  As  of  cats  that  wail  in  chorus.' 

It  was  the  Augustan  age  of  literature. 
Authors  were  listened  to.  They  peti- 
tioned Parliament,  and  their  prayer  was 
heard.  In  the  eighth  year  of  good  Queen 
Anne  the  first  copyright  statute  was 
passed  which,  'for  the  encouragement  of 
'  learned  men  to  compose  and  write  useful 
'  books,'  provided  that  the  authors  of  books 
already  printed  who  had  not  transferred 
their  rights,  and  the  booksellers  or  other 


266  AUTHORS  IN  COURT 

persons  who  had  purchased  the  copy  of 
any  books  in  order  to  print  or  reprint  the 
same,  should  have  the  sole  right  of  print- 
ing them  for  a  term  of  twenty-one  years 
from  the  tenth  of  April,  1710,  and  no 
longer ;  and  that  authors  of  books  not 
then  printed,  should  have  the  sole  right  of 
printing  for  fourteen  years,  and  no  longer. 
Then  followed,  what  the  authors  really 
wanted  the  Act  for,  special  penalties  for 
infringement.  And  there  was  peace  in 
Grub  Street  for  the  space  of  twenty-one 
years.  But  at  the  expiration  of  this  period 
the  fateful  question  was  stirred  —  what 
had  happened  to  the  old  Common  Law 
right  in  perpetuity  ?  Did  it  survive  this 
peddling  Act,  or  had  it  died,  ingloriously 
smothered  by  a  statute?  That  fine  old 
book  —  once  on  every  settle  —  The  Whole 
Duty  of  Man,  first  raised  the  point.  Its 
date  of  publication  was  1657,  so  it  had  had 
its  term  of  twenty-one  years.  That  term 
having  expired,  what  then  ?  The  pro- 
ceedings throw  no  light  upon  the  vexed 
question  of  the  book's  authorship.  Sir 
Joseph  Jekyll  was  content  with  the  evi- 
dence before  him  that,  in  1735  at  all 


AUTHORS  IN  COURT  267 

events,  The  Whole  Duty  of  Man  was,  or 
would  have  been  but  for  the  statute,  the 
property  of  one  Mr.  Eyre.  He  granted 
an  injunction,  thus  in  effect  deciding  that 
the  old  Common  Law  had  survived  the 
statute.  Nor  did  the  defendant  appeal, 
but  sat  down  under  the  affront,  and  left 
The  Whole  Duty  of  Man  alone  for  the 
future. 

Four  years  later  there  came  into  Lord 
Hardwicke's  court '  silver-tongued  Murray,' 
afterwards  Lord  Mansfield,  then  Solicitor- 
General,  and  on  behalf  of  Mr.  Jacob  Ton- 
son  moved  for  an  injunction  to  restrain 
the  publication  of  an  edition  of  Paradise 
Lost.  Tonson's  case  was,  that  Paradise 
Lost  belonged  to  him,  just  as  the  cele- 
brated ewer  by  Benvenuto  Cellini  once 
belonged  to  the  late  Mr.  Beresford  Hope. 
He  proved  his  title  by  divers  mesne  assign- 
ments and  other  acts  in  the  law,  from  Mrs. 
Milton  —  the  poet's  third  wife,  who  exhib- 
ited such  skill  in  the  art  of  widowhood, 
surviving  her  husband  as  she  did  for  fifty- 
three  years.  Lord  Hardwicke  granted  the 
injunction.  It  looked  well  for  the  Com- 
mon Law.  Thomson's  Seasons  next  took 


268  AUTHORS  IN  COURT 

up  the  wondrous  tale.  This  ^delightful 
author,  now  perhaps  better  remembered 
by  his  charming  habit  of  eating  peaches 
off  the  wall  with  both  hands  in  his  pockets, 
than  by  his  great  work,  had  sold  the  book 
to  Andrew  Millar,  the  bookseller  whom 
Johnson  respected  because,  said  he,  'he 
'has  raised  the  price  of  literature.'  If  so, 
it  must  have  been  but  low  before,  for  he 
only  gave  Thomson  a  hundred  guineas 
for 'Summer,'  'Autumn,'  and  'Winter,'  and 
some  other  pieces.  The  '  Spring '  he  bought 
separately,  along  with  the  ill-fated  tragedy, 
Sophonisba,  for  one  hundred  and  thirty- 
seven  pounds  ten  shillings.  A  knave 
called  Robert  Taylor  pirated  Millar's  Thom- 
son's Seasons ;  and  on  the  morrow  of  All 
Souls  in  Michaelmas,  in  the  seventh  year 
of  King  George  the  Third,  Andrew  Millar 
brought  his  plea  of  trespass  on  the  case 
against  Robert  Taylor,  and  gave  pledges 
of  prosecution,  to  wit,  John  Doe  and 
Richard  Roe.  The  case  was  recognised 
to  be  of  great  importance,  and  was  argued 
at  becoming  length  in  the  King's  Bench. 
Lord  Mansfield  and  Justices  Willes  and 
Aston  upheld  the  Common  Law.  It  was, 


AUTHORS  IN  COURT  269 

they  declared,  unaffected  by  the  statute. 
Mr.  Justice  Yates  dissented,  and  in  the 
course  of  a  judgment  occupying  nearly 
three  hours,  gave  some  of  his  reasons.  It 
was  the  first  time  the  court  had  ever  finally 
differed  since  Mansfield  presided  over  it. 
Men  felt  the  matter  could  not  rest  there. 
Nor  did  it.  Millar  died,  and  went  to  his 
own  place.  His  executors  put  up  Thom- 
son's Poems  for  sale  by  public  auction,  and 
one  Beckett  bought  them  for  five  hundred 
and  five  pounds.  When  we  remember 
that  Millar  only  gave  two  hundred  and 
forty-two  pounds  ten  shillings  for  them  in 
1729,  and  had  therefore  enjoyed  more  than 
forty  years'  exclusive  monopoly,  we  realise 
not  only  that  Millar  had  made  a  good  thing 
out  of  his  brother  Scot,  but  what  great 
interests  were  at  stake.  Thomson's  Sea- 
sons, erst  Millar's,  now  became  Beckett's  ; 
and  when  one  Donaldson  of  Edinburgh 
brought  out  an  edition  of  the  poems,  it 
became  the  duty  of  Beckett  to  take  pro- 
ceedings, which  he  did  by  filing  a  bill  in 
the  Court  of  Chancery.1 

1  Donaldson   was   a  well-known   man  in  Edinburgh. 
He  was  Boswell's  first  publisher,  and  on  one  occasion 


27O  AUTHORS  IN  COURT 

These  proceedings  found  their  way,  as 
all  decent  proceedings  do,  to  the  House  of 
Lords  —  farther  than  which  you  cannot  go, 
though  ever  so  minded.  It  was  now  high 
time  to  settle  this  question,  and  their  lord- 
ships accordingly,  as  was  their  proud  prac- 
tice in  great  cases,  summoned  the  judges 
of  the  land  before  their  bar,  and  put  to 
them  five  carefully-worded  questions,  all 
going  to  the  points  —  what  was  the  old 
Common  Law  right,  and  has  it  survived 
the  statute?  Eleven  judges  attended, 
heard  the  questions,  bowed  and  retired  to 
consider  their  answers.  On  the  fifteenth 
of  February,  1774,  they  reappeared,  and  it 
being  announced  that  they  differed,  instead 
of  being  locked  up  without  meat,  drink,  or 
firing  until  they  agreed,  they  were  re- 
quested to  deliver  their  opinions  with  their 
reasons,  which  they  straightway  proceeded 
to  do.  The  result  may  be  stated  with  tol- 
erable accuracy  thus :  by  ten  to  one  they 

gave  that  gentleman  a  dinner  consisting  mainly  of  pig. 
Johnson's  view  of  his  larcenous  proceedings  is  stated  in 
the  Life.  Thurlow  was  his  counsel  in  this  litigation. 
Donaldson's  Hospital  in  Edinburgh  represents  the  for- 
tune made  by  this  publisher. 


AUTHORS  IN  COURT  2/1 

were  of  opinion  that  the  old  Common  Law 
recognised  perpetual  copyright.  By  six  to 
five  they  were  of  opinion  that  the  statute 
of  Queen  Anne  had  destroyed  this  right. 
The  House  of  Lords  adopted  the  opinion 
of  the  majority,  reversed  the  decree  of  the 
Court  below,  and  thus  Thomson's  Seasons 
became  your  Seasons,  my  Seasons,  any- 
body's Seasons.  But  by  how  slender  a 
majority !  To  make  it  even  more  exciting, 
it  was  notorious  that  the  most  eminent 
judge  on  the  Bench  (Lord  Mansfield)  agreed 
with  the  minority  ;  but  owing  to  the  com- 
bined circumstances  of  his  having  already, 
in  a  case  practically  between  the  same 
parties  and  relating  to  the  same  matter, 
expressed  his  opinion,  and  of  his  being 
not  merely  a  judge  but  a  peer,  he  was  pre- 
vented (by  etiquette)  from  taking  any  part, 
either  as  a  judge  or  as  a  peer,  in  the  pro- 
ceedings. Had  he  not  been  prevented  (by 
etiquette),  who  can  say  what  the  result 
might  have  been  ? 

Here  ends  the  story  of  how  authors  and 
their  assignees  were  disinherited  by  mis- 
take, and  forced  to  content  themselves  with 


2/2  AUTHORS  IN  COURT 

such  beggarly  terms  of  enjoyment  as  a  hos- 
tile legislature  doles  out  to  them. 

As  the  law  now  stands,  they  may  en- 
joy their  own  during  the  period  of  the 
author's  life, //#.$•  seven  years,  or  the  period 
of  forty-two  years,  whichever  may  chance 
to  prove  the  longer. 

So  strangely  and  so  quickly  does  the 
law  colour  men's  notions  of  what  is  inher- 
ently decent,  that  even  authors  have  for- 
gotten how  fearfully  they  have  been  abused 
and  how  cruelly  robbed.  Their  thoughts 
are  turned  in  quite  other  directions.  I  do 
not  suppose  they  will  care  for  these  old- 
world  memories.  Their  great  minds  are 
tossing  on  the  ocean  which  pants  dumbly- 
passionate  with  dreams  of  royalties.  If 
they  could  only  shame  the  English-reading 
population  of  the  United  States  to  pay 
for  their  literature,  all  would  be  well. 
Whether  they  ever  will,  depends  upon 
themselves.  If  English  authors  will  pub- 
lish their  books  cheap,  Brother  Sam  may, 
and  probably  will,  pay  them  a  penny  a 
copy,  or  some  such  sum.  If  they  will  not, 
he  will  go  on  stealing.  It  is  wrong,  but 
he  will  do  it.  '  He  says,'  observes  an 


AUTHORS  IN  COURT  2/3 

American   writer,    'that   he  was   born  of 
*  poor  but  honest  parents,    /say,  "Bah ! "  ' 1 

1 1  was  wrong,  and  this  very  volume  is  protected  by 
law  in  the  United  States  of  America  —  but  it  still  re- 
mains pleasingly  uncertain  whether  the  book-buying 
public  across  the  water  who  were  willing  to  buy  Obiter 
Dicta  for  twelve  cents  will  give  a  dollar  for  Res  Judi- 
cata. 


NATIONALITY 

NOTHING  can  well  be  more  offensive 
than  the  abrupt  asking  of  questions,  un- 
less indeed  it  be  the  glib  assurance  which 
professes  to  be  able  to  answer  them  with- 
out a  moment's  doubt  or  consideration. 
It  is  hard  to  forgive  Sir  Robert  Peel  for 
having  once  asked,  '  What  is  a  pound  ? ' 
Cobden's  celebrated  question,  'What  next? 
And  next?'  was  perhaps  less  objection- 
able, being  vast  and  vague,  and  to  employ 
Sir  Thomas  Browne's  well-known  phrase, 
capable  of  a  wide  solution. 

But  in  these  disagreeable  days  we  must 
be  content  to  be  disagreeable.  We  must 
even  accept  being  so  as  our  province.  It 
seems  now  recognised  that  he  is  the  best 
Parliamentary  debater  who  is  most  disa- 
greeable. It  is  not  so  easy  as  some  people 
imagine  to  be  disagreeable.  The  gift  re- 
quires cultivation.  It  is  easier,  no  doubt, 
for  some  than  for  others. 
274 


NA  TI  ON  A  LIT  Y  2?$ 

What  is  a  nation  —  socially  and  politi- 
cally, and  as  a  unit  to  be  dealt  with  by 
practical  politicians  ?  It  is  not  a  great 
many  things.  It  is  not  blood,  it  is  not 
birth,  it  is  not  breeding.  A  man  may 
have  been  born  at  Surat  and  educated  at 
Lausanne,  one  of  his  four  great-grand- 
fathers may  have  been  a  Dutchman,  one  of 
his  four  great-grandmothers  a  French  refu- 
gee, and  yet  he  himself  may  remain  from 
his  cradle  in  Surat  to  his  grave  at  Singa- 
pore, a  true-born  Englishman,  with  all  an 
Englishman's  fine  contempt  for  mixed  races 
and  struggling  nationalities. 

Where  the  English  came  from  is  still  a 
matter  of  controversy,  but  where  they  have 
gone  to  is  writ  large  over  the  earth's  sur- 
face. Yet  their  nationality  has  suffered 
no  eclipse.  Caviare  is  not  so  good  in  Lon- 
don as  in  Moscow,  but  it  is  caviare  all  the 
same.  No  foreigner  needs  to  ask  the 
nationality  of  the  man  who  treads  on  his 
corns,  smiles  at  his  religion,  and  does  not 
want  to  know  anything  about  his  aspira- 
tions. 

England  has  all  the  notes  of  a  nation. 
She  has  a  National  Church,  based  upon  a 


2/6  NA  TIONALIT  Y 

view  of  history  peculiarly  her  own.  She 
has  a  National  Oath,  which,  without  any 
undue  pride,  may  be  pronounced  adequate 
for  ordinary  occasions.  She  has  a  Consti- 
tution, the  admiration  of  the  world,  and  of 
which  a  fresh  account  has  to  be  written 
every  twenty  years.  She  has  a  History, 
glorious  in  individual  feats,  and  splendid  in 
accomplished  facts ;  she  has  a  Literature 
which  makes  the  poorest  of  her  children, 
if  only  he  has  been  taught  to  read,  rich 
beyond  the  dreams  of  avarice.  As  for  the 
national  character,  it  may  be  said  of  an 
Englishman,  what  has  been  truly  said  of 
the  great  English  poet  Wordsworth  —  take 
him  at  his  best  and  he  need  own  no  supe- 
rior. He  cannot  always  be  at  his  best ; 
and  when  he  is  at  his  worst  the  world 
shudders. 

But  what  about  Scotland  and  Ireland? 
Are  they  nations  ?  If  they  are  not,  it  is 
not  because  their  separate  characteristics 
have  been  absorbed  by  John  Bullism. 
Scotland  and  Ireland  are  no  more  England 
than  Holland  or  Belgium.  It  may  be 
doubted  whether,  if  the  three  countries 
had  never  been  politically  united,  their 


NATIONALITY 

existing  unlikeness  would  have  been  any 
greater  than  it  is.  It  is  a  most  accentuated 
unlikeness.  Scotland  has  her  own  pre- 
vailing religion.  Mr.  Arnold  recognised 
this  when  he  observed,  in  that  manner  of 
his  which  did  not  always  give  pleasure, 
that  Dr.  Chalmers  reminded  him  of  a 
Scotch  thistle  valorously  trying  to  look  as 
much  like  the  rose  of  Sharon  as  possible. 
This  distorted  view  of  Mr.  Arnold's  at  all 
events  recognises  a  fact.  Then  there  is 
Scotch  law.  If  there  is  one  legal  propo- 
sition which  John  Bull  —  poor  attorney- 
ridden  John  Bull  —  has  grasped  for  himself, 
it  is  that  a  promise  made  without  a  mone- 
tary or  otherwise  valuable  consideration,  is 
in  its  legal  aspect  a  thing  of  nought,  which 
may  be  safely  disregarded.  Bull's  views 
about  the  necessity  of  writing  and  sixpenny 
stamps  are  vague,  but  he  is  quite  sound 
and  certain  about  promises  going  for  noth- 
ing unless  something  passed  between  the 
parties.  Thus,  if  an  Englishman,  moved, 
let  us  say,  by  the  death  of  his  father,  says 
hastily  to  a  maiden  aunt  who  has  made  the 
last  days  of  his  progenitor  easy,  '  I  will  give 
'you  fifty  pounds  a  year,'  and  then  repents 


278  NATIONALITY 

him  of  his  promise,  he  is  under  no  legal 
obligation  to  make  it  good.  If  he  is  a  gen- 
tleman he  will  send  her  a  ten-pound  note 
at  Christmas  and  a  fat  goose  at  Mich- 
aelmas, and  the  matter  drops  as  being 
but  the  babble  of  the  sick-room.  But  in 
Scotland  the  maiden  aunt,  provided  she 
can  prove  her  promise,  can  secure  her  an- 
nuity and  live  merrily  in  Peebles  for  the 
rest  of  a  voluptuous  life.  Here  is  a  differ- 
ence indeed! 

Then,  Scotland  has  a  history  of  her  own. 
The  late  Dr.  Hill  Burton  wrote  it  in  nine 
comfortable  volumes.  She  has  a  thousand 
traditions,  foreign  connections,  feelings  to 
which  the  English  breast  must  always 
remain  an  absolute  stranger.  Scottish  fields 
are  different  from  English  fields ;  her  farms, 
roads,  walls,  buildings,  flowers,  are  differ- 
ent ;  her  schools,  universities,  churches, 
household  ways,  songs,  foods,  drinks,  are 
all  as  different  as  may  be.  Boswell's  John- 
son, Lockhart's  Scott !  What  a  host  of 
dissimilarities,  what  an  Iliad  of  unlike- 
nesses,  do  the  two  names  of  Johnson  and 
Scott  call  up  from  the  vasty  deep  of 
national  differences ! 


NA  TIONALIT  Y  279 

One  great  note  of  a  nation  is  possessed 
to  the  full  by  Scotland.  I  mean  the  power 
of  blending  into  one  state  of  national  feel- 
ing all  those  who  call  what  is  contained 
within  her  geographical  boundaries  by  the 
sacred  name  of  '  Home.'  The  Lowlander 
from  Dumfries  is  more  at  home  at  Inver- 
ness than  in  York.  Why  is  this  ?  Because 
Scotland  is  a  nation.  The  great  Smollett, 
who  challenges  Dickens  for  the  foremost 
place  amongst  British  comic  writers,  had 
no  Celtic  blood  in  his  veins.  He  was 
neither  a  Papist  nor  a  Jacobite,  yet  how 
did  his  Scottish  blood  boil  whilst  listening 
in  London  to  the  cowardly  exultations  of 
the  cockneys  over  the  brutalities  that  fol- 
lowed the  English  victory  at  Colloden  !  and 
how  bitterly  —  almost  savagely  —  did  he 
contrast  that  cowardly  exultation  with  the 
depression  and  alarm  that  had  prevailed  in 
London  when  but  a  little  while  before  the 
Scotch  had  reached  Derby. 

What  patriotic  feeling  breathes  through 
Smollett's  noble  lines,  The  Tears  of  Cale- 
donia, and  with  what  delightful  enthusi- 
asm, with  what  affectionate  admiration, 
does  Sir  Walter  Scott  tell  us  how  the 


280  NATIONALITY 

last  stanza  came  to  be  written !  '  He 
'  (Smollett)  accordingly  read  them  the 
'  first  sketch  of  the  Tears  of  Scotland 
'  consisting  only  of  six  stanzas,  and  on 
'  their  remarking  that  the  termination  of 
*  the  poem,  being  too  strongly  expressed, 
'  might  give  offence  to  persons  whose 
'  political  opinions  were  different,  he  sat 
'  down  without  reply,  and  with  an  air  of 
'  great  indignation,  subjoined  the  conclud- 
'  ing  stanza  : 

' "  While  the  warm  blood  bedews  my  veins, 
And  unimpaired  remembrance  reigns, 
Resentment  of  my  country's  fate 
Within  my  filial  breast  shall  beat. 
Yes,  spite  of  thine  insulting  foe, 
My  sympathising  verse  shall  flow, 
Mourn,  hopeless  Caledonia,  mourn, 
Thy  banished  peace,  thy  laurels  torn."  ' 

In  the  same  sense  is  the  story  told  by 
Mr.  R.  L.  Stevenson,  how,  when  the  fa- 
mous Celtic  regiment,  the  Black  Watch, 
which  then  drew  its  recruits  from  the  now 
unpeopled  glens  of  Ross-shire  and  Suther- 
land, returned  to  Scotland  after  years  of 
foreign  service,  veterans  leaped  out  of  the 
boats  and  kissed  the  shore  of  Galloway. 


NA  TIONALIT  Y  2  8 1 

The  notes  of  Irish  nationality  have  been, 
by  conquest  and  ill-usage,  driven  deeper  in. 
Her  laws  were  taken  from  her,  and  her 
religion  brutally  proscribed.  In  the  great 
matter  of  national  education  she  has  not 
been  allowed  her  natural  and  proper  devel- 
opment. Her  children  have  been  driven 
abroad  to  foreign  seminaries  to  get  the 
religious  education  Protestant  England 
denied  them  at  home.  Her  nationality 
has  thus  been  checked  and  mutilated,  but 
that  it  exists  in  spirit  and  in  fact  can 
hardly  be  questioned  by  any  impartial  trav- 
eller. Englishmen  have  many  gifts,  but 
one  gift  they  have  not  —  that  of  making 
Scotsmen  and  Irishmen  forget  their  native 
land. 

The  attitude  of  some  Englishmen  towards 
Scotch  and  Irish  national  feelings  requires 
correction.  The  Scotsman's  feelings  are 
laughed  at.  The  Irishman's  insulted.  So 
far  as  the  laughter  is  concerned,  it  must  be 
admitted  that  it  is  good-humoured.  Burns, 
Scott,  and  Carlyle,  Scotch  moors  and  Scotch 
whisky,  the  royal  game  of  golf,  all  have 
mollified  and  beautified  English  feelings. 
In  candour,  too,  it  must  be  admitted  that 


282  NATIONALITY 

Scotsmen  are  not  conciliatory.  They  do 
not  meet  people  half-way.  I  do  not  think 
the  laughter  does  much  harm.  Insults  are 
different.  .  .  . 

Mr.  Arnold,  in  a  now  scarce  pamphlet 
published  in  1859,  on  tne  Italian  Question, 
with  the  motto  prefixed,  '  Sed  nondum  est 
finis?  makes  the  following  interesting  ob- 
servations :  — 

'  Let  an  Englishman  or  a  Frenchman, 
'  who  respectively  represent  the  two  great- 
'  est  nationalities  of  modern  Europe,  sin- 

*  cerely  ask  himself  what  it  is  that  makes 
'  him  take  pride  in  his  nationality,  what  it 
'  is  which  would  make  it  intolerable  to  his 
'  feelings  to  pass,  or  to  see  any  part  of  his 
'  country   pass,    under    foreign    dominion. 
'  He  will  find  that  it  is  the  sense  of  self- 

*  esteem  generated  by  knowing  the  figure 
'which   his  nation  makes  in  history  ;   by 
'  considering  the  achievements  of  his  nation 
'  in  war,  government,  arts,  literature,  or  in- 
dustry.    It  is  the  sense  that  his  people, 
'which  has  done  such  great  things,  merits 
'  to  exist  in  freedom  and  dignity,  and  to  en- 
'  joy  the  luxury  of  self-respect.' 

This  is  admirable,  but  not,  nor  does  it 


NA  TIONALIT  Y  283 

pretend  to  be,  exhaustive.  The  love  of 
country  is  something  a  little  more  than 
mere  amour  propre.  You  may  love  your 
mother,  and  wish  to  make  a  home  for  her, 
even  though  she  never  dwelt  in  kings' 
palaces,  and  is  clad  in  rags.  The  children 
of  misery  and  misfortune  are  not  all  ille- 
gitimate. Sometimes  you  may  discern 
amongst  them  high  hope  and  pious  endeav- 
our. There  may  be,  indeed,  there  is,  a 
Niobe  amongst  the  nations,  but  tears  are 
not  always  of  despair. 

'  The  luxury  of  self-respect.'  It  is  a  wise 
phrase.  To  make  Ireland  and  Irishmen 
self-respectful  is  the  task  of  statesmen. 


THE   REFORMATION 

LONG  ago  an  eminent  Professor  of  Inter- 
national Law,  at  the  University  of  Cam- 
bridge, lecturing  his  class,  spoke  somewhat 
disparagingly  of  the  Reformation  as  com- 
pared with  the  Renaissance,  and  regretted 
there  was  no  adequate  history  of  the 
glorious  events  called  by  the  latter  name. 
So  keenly  indeed  did  the  Professor  feel  this 
gap  in  his  library,  that  he  proceeded  to  say 
that  inconvenient  as  it  had  been  to  him  to 
lecture  at  Cambridge  that  afternoon,  still 
if  what  he  had  said  should  induce  any 
member  of  the  class  to  write  a  history  of 
the  Renaissance  worthy  to  be  mentioned 
with  the  masterpiece  of  Gibbon,  he  (the 
Professor)  would  never  again  think  it  right 
to  refer  to  the  inconvenience  he  had 
personally  been  put  to  in  the  matter. 

It  must  be  twenty  years  since  these 
words  were  uttered.  The  class  to  whom 
284 


THE  REFORMATION  285 

they  were  addressed  is  scattered  far  and 
wide,  even  as  the  household  referred  to  in 
the  touching  poem  of  Mrs.  Hemans.  No 
one  of  them  has  written  a  history  of  the 
Renaissance.  It  is  now  well-nigh  certain 
no  one  of  them  ever  will.  Looking  back 
over  those  twenty  years  it  seems  a  pity  it 
was  never  attempted.  As  Owen  Meredith 
sweetly  sings  — 

'  And  it  all  seems  now  in  the  waste  of  life 
Such  a  very  little  thing.' 

But  it  has  remained  undone.  Regrets  are 
vain. 

For  my  part,  I  will  make  bold  to  say 
that  the  Professor  was  all  wrong.  Pro- 
fessors do  not  stand  where  they  did.  They 
have  been  blown  upon.  The  ugliest  gap 
in  an  Englishman's  library  is  in  the  shelf 
which  ought  to  contain,  but  does  not,  a 
history  of  the  Reformation  of  Religion  in 
his  own  country.  It  is  a  subject  made  for 
an  Englishman's  hand.  At  present  it  is 
but  (to  employ  some  old-fashioned  words) 
a  hotch-potch,  a  gallimaufry,  a  confused 
mingle-mangle  of  divers  things  jumbled  or 
put  together.  Puritan  and  Papist,  Anglican 


286  THE  REFORMATION 

and  Erastian,  pull  out  what  they  choose, 
and  drop  whatever  they  do  not  like  with  a 
grimace  of  humorous  disgust.  What  faces 
the  early  Tractarians  used  to  pull  over 
Bishop  Jewel !  How  Dr.  Maitland  de- 
lighted in  exhibiting  the  boundless  vulgar- 
ity of  the  Puritan  party  !  Lord  Macaulay 
had  only  a  paragraph  or  two  to  spare  for 
the  Reformation  ;  but  as  we  note  amongst 
the  contents  of  his  first  chapter  the  fol- 
lowing heads :  '  The  Reformation  and  its 
Effects,' '  Origin  of  the  Church  of  England,' 
'  Her  Peculiar  Character,'  we  do  not  need 
to  be  further  reminded  of  the  views  of  that 
arch-Erastian. 

It  is  time  someone  put  a  stop  to  this 
'help  yourself  procedure.  What  is  needed 
to  do  this  is  a  long,  luminous,  leisurely  his- 
tory, written  by  somebody  who,  though 
wholly  engrossed  by  his  subject,  is  yet 
absolutely  indifferent  to  it. 

The  great  want  at  present  is  of  common 
knowledge  ;  common,  that  is,  to  all  parties. 
The  Catholic  tells  his  story,  which  is  much 
the  most  interesting  one,  sure  of  his  audi- 
ence. The  Protestant  falls  back  upon  his 
Fox,  and  relights  the  fires  of  Smithfield 


THE  REFORMATION  287 

with  entire  self-satisfaction.  The  Erastian 
flourishes  his  Acts  of  Parliament  in  the 
face  of  the  Anglican,  who  burrows  like  a 
cony  in  the  rolls  of  Convocation.  Each  is 
familiar  with  one  set  of  facts,  and  shrinks 
nervously  from  the  honour  of  an  introduc- 
tion to  a  totally  new  set.  We  are  not  going 
to  change  our  old  ' mumpsimus'  for  any- 
body's new  'sumpsimus!  But  we  must 
some  day,  and  we  shall  when  this  new 
history  gets  itself  written. 

The  subject  cannot  be  said  to  lack  charm. 
Border  lands,  marches,  passes  are  always 
romantic.  No  bagman  can  cross  the  Tweed 
without  emotion.  The  wanderer  on  the 
Malvern  Hills  soon  learns  to  turn  his  eyes 
from  the  dull  eastward  plain  to  where  they 
can  be  feasted  on  the  dim  outlines  of  wild 
Wales.  Border  periods  of  history  have 
something  of  the  same  charm.  How  the 
old  thing  ceased  to  be  ?  How  the  new 
thing  became  what  it  is  ?  How  the  old 
colours  faded,  and  the  old  learning  disap- 
peared, and  the  Church  of  Edward  the 
Confessor,  and  St.  Thomas  of  Canterbury, 
and  William  of  Wykeham,  became  the 
Church  of  George  the  Third,  Archbishop 


288  THE  REFORMATION 

Tait,  and  Dean  Stanley  ?  There  is  surely 
a  tale  to  be  told.  Something  must  have 
happened  at  the  Reformation.  Somebody 
was  dispossessed.  The  common  people  no 
longer  heard  'the  blessed  mutter  of  the 
'  mass,'  nor  saw  '  God  made  and  eaten  all 
'day  long.'  Ancient  services  ceased,  old 
customs  were  disregarded,  familiar  words 
began  to  go  out  of  fashion.  The  Reforma- 
tion meant  something.  On  these  points 
the  Catholics  entertain  no  kind  of  doubt. 
That  they  suffered  ejectment  they  tearfully 
admit.  Nor,  to  do  them  justice,  have  they 
ever  acquiesced  in  the  wrong  they  allege 
was  then  done  them,  or  exhibited  the  faint- 
est admiration  for  the  intruder. 

'  Have  ye  beheld  the  young  God  of  the  Seas, 
My  dispossessor?     Have  ye  seen  his  face? 
Have  ye  beheld  his  chariot  foam'd  along 
By  noble  wing'd  creatures  he  hath  made? 
I  saw  him  on  the  calmed  waters  scud, 
With  such  a  glow  of  beauty  in  his  eyes 
That  it  enforced  me  to  bid  sad  farewell 
To  all  my  empire.' 

This  has  never  been  the  attitude  or  the 
language  of  the  Roman  Church  towards 
the  Anglican.  '  Canterbury  has  gone  its 


THE  REFORMATION  289 

'way,  and  York  is  gone,  and  Durham  is 
'gone,  and  Winchester  is  gone.  It  was 
'sore  to  part  with  them.'  So  spoke  Dr. 
Newman  on  a  memorable  occasion.  His 
distress  would  have  been  no  greater  had 
the  venerable  buildings  to  which  he  alluded 
been  in  the  possession  of  the  Baptists. 

But  against  this  view  must  be  set  the 
one  represented  by  the  somewhat  boister- 
ous Church  of  Englandism  of  Dean  Hook, 
who  ever  maintained  that  all  the  Church 
did  at  the  Reformation  was  to  wash  her 
dirty  face,  and  that  consequently  she  under- 
went only  an  external  and  not  a  corporate 
change  during  the  process. 

There  are  thousands  of  pious  souls  to 
whom  the  question,  What  happened  at  the 
Reformation?  is  of  supreme  importance; 
and  yet  there  is  no  history  of  the  period 
written  by  a  '  kinless  loon,'  whose  own  per- 
sonal indifference  to  Church  Authority 
shall  be  as  great  as  his  passion  for  facts, 
his  love  of  adventures  and  biography,  and 
his  taste  for  theology. 

In  the  meantime,  and  pending  the  pro- 
duction of  the  immortal  work,  it  is  pleasant 
to  notice  that  annually  the  historian's  task 


2QO  THE  REFORMATION 

is  being  made  easier.  Books  are  being  pub- 
lished, and  old  manuscripts  edited  and 
printed,  which  will  greatly  assist  the  good 
man,  and  enable  him  to  write  his  book  by 
his  own  fireside.  The  Catholics  have  been 
very  active  of  late  years.  They  have  shaken 
off  their  shyness  and  reserve,  and  however 
reluctant  they  still  may  be  to  allow  their 
creeds  to  be  overhauled  and  their  rites  cur- 
tailed by  strangers,  they  have  at  least  come 
with  their  histories  in  their  hands  and  in- 
vited criticism.  The  labours  of  Father 
Morris  of  the  Society  of  Jesus,  and  of  the 
late  Father  Knox  of  the  London  Oratory, 
greatly  lighten  and  adorn  the  path  of  the 
student  who  loves  to  be  told  what  happened 
long  ago,  not  in  order  that  he  may  know 
how  to  cast  his  vote  at  the  next  election, 
but  simply  because  it  so  happened,  and  for 
no  other  reason  whatsoever. 

Father  Knox's  name  has  just  been 
brought  before  the  world,  not,  it  is  to  be 
hoped,  for  the  last  time,  by  the  publication 
of  a  small  book,  partly  his,  but  chiefly  the 
work  of  the  Rev.  T.  E.  Bridgett,  entitled 
The  True  Story  of  the  Catholic  Hierarchy 
deposed  by  Queen  Elisabeth,  with  Fuller 


THE  REFORMATION  29 1 

Memoirs  of  its  Two  Last  Survivors  (Burns 
and  Gates). 

The  book  was  much  wanted.  When 
Queen  Mary  died,  on  the  i/th  of  Novem- 
ber, 1558,  the  dioceses  of  Oxford,  Salis- 
bury, Bangor,  Gloucester,  and  Hereford 
were  vacant.  The  Archbishop  of  Canter- 
bury, Reginald  Pole,  died  a  few  hours 
after  his  royal  relative ;  and  the  Bishops 
of  Rochester,  Norwich,  Chichester,  and 
Bristol  did  not  long  survive  her.  It  thus 
happened  that  at  the  opening  of  1559 
there  were  only  sixteen  bishops  on  the 
bench.  What  became  of  them  ?  The 
book  I  have  just  mentioned  answers  this 
deeply  interesting  question. 

One  of  them,  Oglethorpe  of  Carlisle, 
was  induced  to  crown  the  Queen,  which 
service  was,  however,  performed  according 
to  the  Roman  ceremonial,  and  included 
the  Unction,  the  Pontifical  Mass,  and  the 
Communion  ;  but  when  the  oath  pre- 
scribed by  the  Act  of  Supremacy  was 
tendered  to  the  bishops,  they  all,  with  one 
exception,  Kitchen  of  Llandaff,  declined 
to  take  it,  and  their  depositions  followed 
in  due  course,  though  at  different  dates, 


2Q2  THE  REFORMATION 

during  the  year  1559.  They  were,  in 
plain  English,  turned  out,  and  their  places 
given  to  others. 

A  whole  hierarchy  turned  a-begging  like 
this  might  have  been  a  very  startling  thing 
—  but  it  does  not  seem  to  have  been  so. 
There  was  no  Ambrose  amongst  the  bish- 
ops. The  mob  showed  no  disposition  to 
rescue  Bonner  from  the  Marshalsea.  The 
Queen  called  them  '  a  set  of  lazy  scamps.' 
This  was  hard  measure.  The  reverend 
authors  of  the  book  before  me  call  them 
'  confessors,'  which  they  certainly  were. 
But  there  is  something  disappointing  and 
non-apostolic  about  them.  They  none  of 
them  came  to  violent  ends.  What  did 
happen  to  them  ? 

The  classical  passage  recording  their 
fortunes  occurs  in  Lord  Burghley's  Execu- 
tion of  Justice  in  England,  which  appeared 
in  1583.  His  lordship  in  a  good-tempered 
vein  runs  through  the  list  of  the  deposed 
bishops  one  by  one,  and  says  in  substance, 
and  in  a  style  not  unlike  Lord  Russell's, 
that  the  only  hardship  put  upon  them  was 
their  removal  'from  their  ecclesiastical 
'offices,  which  they  would  not  exercise 


THE  REFORMATION  293 

'  according  to  law.'  For  the  rest,  they  were 
'for  a  great  time  retained  in  bishops'  houses 
'in  very  civil  and  courteous  manner,  with- 
'  out  charge  to  themselves  or  their  friends, 
'until  the  time  the  Pope  began,  by  his  Bulls 
'  and  messages,  to  offer  trouble  to  the  realm 
'  by  stirring  of  rebellion  ; '  then  Burghley 
admits,  some  of  them  were  removed  to 
more  quiet  places,  but  still  without  being 
'  called  to  any  capital  or  bloody  question.' 

In  this  view  historians  have  pretty  gen- 
erally acquiesced.  Camden  speaks  of  Tun- 
stall  of  Durham  dying  at  Lambeth  '  in 
'  free  custody '  —  a  happy  phrase  which 
may  be  recommended  to  those  of  Her 
Majesty's  subjects  in  Ireland  who  find 
themselves  in  prison  under  a  statute  of 
Edward  III.,  not  for  doing  anything,  but 
for  refusing  to  say  they  will  not  do  it 
again.  Even  that  most  erudite  and  delight- 
ful of  English  Catholics,  Charles  Butler, 
who  is  one  of  the  pleasantest  memories  of 
Lincoln's  Inn,  made  but  little  of  the  suf- 
ferings of  these  bishops,  whilst  some  Prot- 
estant writers  have  thought  it  quite  amazing 
they  were  not  all  burnt  as  heretics.  '  There 
'were  no  retaliatory  burnings,'  says  Canon 


294  THE  REFORMATION 

Perry  regretfully.  But  this  surely  is  carry- 
ing Anglican  assurance  to  an  extraordinary 
pitch.  What  were  they  to  be  burnt  for  ? 
You  are  burnt  for  heresy.  That  is  right 
enough.  No  one  would  complain  of  that. 
But  who  in  the  year  1559  would  have  been 
bold  enough  to  declare  that  the  Archbishop 
of  York  was  a  heretic  for  refusing  an  oath 
prescribed  by  an  Act  of  the  Queen  of  the 
same  year?  Why,  even  now,  after  three 
centuries  and  a  quarter  of  possession,  I 
suppose  Lord  Selborne  would  hesitate 
before  burning  the  Archbishop  of  West- 
minster as  a  heretic.  Hanging  is  a  differ- 
ent matter.  It  is  very  easy  to  get  hung  — 
but  to  be  burnt  requires  a  combination  of 
circumstances  not  always  forthcoming. 
Canon  Perry  should  have  remembered 
this. 

These  deposed  bishops  were  neither 
burnt  nor  hung.  The  aged  Tunstall  of 
Durham,  who  had  played  a  very  shabby 
part  in  Henry's  time,  died,  where  he  was 
bound  to  die,  in  his  bed,  very  shortly  after 
his  deposition ;  so  also  did  the  Bishops  of 
Lichfield  and  Coventry,  St.  David's,  Car- 
lisle, and  Winchester.  Dr.  Scott  of  Ches- 


THE  REFORMATION  295 

ter,  after  four  years  in  the  Fleet  prison, 
managed  to  escape  to  Belgium,  where  he 
died  in  1565.  Dr.  Pate  of  Worcester,  who 
was  a  Council  of  Trent  man,  spent  three 
years  in  the  Tower,  and  then  contrived  to 
slip  away  unobserved.  Dr.  Poole  of  Peter- 
borough was  never  in  prison  at  all,  but  was 
allowed  to  live  in  retirement  in  the  neigh- 
bourhood of  London  till  his  death  in  1568. 
Bishop  Bonner  was  kept  a  close  prisoner 
in  the  Marshalsea  till  his  death  in  1569. 
He  was  not  popular  in  London.  As  he 
had  burnt  about  one  hundred  and  twenty 
persons,  this  need  not  surprise  us.  Bishop 
Bourne  of  Bath  and  Wells  was  lodged  in 
the  Tower  from  June,  1560,  to  the  autumn 
of  1563,  when  the  plague  breaking  out,  he 
was  quartered  on  the  new  Bishop  of  Lin- 
coln, who  had  to  provide  him  with  bed  and 
board  till  May,  1566,  after  which  date  the 
ex-bishop  was  allowed  to  be  at  large  till  his 
death  in  1 569.  The  Bishop  of  Exeter  was 
kept  in  the  Tower  for  three  years.  What 
subsequently  became  of  him  is  not  known. 
He  is  supposed  to  have  lived  in  the  coun- 
try. Bishop  Thirlby  of  Ely,  after  three 
years  in  the  Tower,  lived  for  eleven  years 


296  THE  REFORMATION 

with  Archbishop  Parker,  uncomfortably 
enough,  without  confession  or  mass.  Then 
he  died.  It  is  not  to  be  supposed  that 
Parker  ever  told  his  prisoner  that  they  both 
belonged  to  the  same  Church.  Dr.  Heath, 
the  Archbishop  of  York,  survived  his  depri- 
vation twenty  years,  three  only  of  which 
were  spent  in  prison.  He  was  a  man  of 
more  mark  than  most  of  his  brethren,  and 
had  defended  the  Papal  supremacy  with 
power  and  dignity  in  his  place  in  Parlia- 
ment. The  Queen,  who  had  a  liking  for 
him,  was  very  anxious  to  secure  his  pres- 
ence at  some  of  the  new  offices,  but  he 
would  never  go,  summing  up  his  objec- 
tions thus: — 'Whatever  is  contrary  to  the 
'  Catholic  faith  is  heresy,  whatever  is  con- 
'  trary  to  Unity  is  schism.'  On  getting  out 
of  the  Tower,  Dr.  Heath,  who  had  a  pri- 
vate estate,  lived  upon  it  till  his  death. 
Dr.  Watson  of  Lincoln  was  the  most  learned 
and  the  worst  treated  of  the  deposed  bis- 
hops. He  was  in  the  Tower  and  the  Mar- 
shalsea,  with  short  intervals,  from  1559  to 
1577,  when  he  was  handed  over  to  the 
custody  of  the  Bishop  of  Winchester,  who 
passed  him  on,  after  eighteen  months,  to 


THE  REFORMATION  297 

his  brother  of  Rochester,  from  whose  charge 
he  was  removed  to  join  other  prisoners  in 
Wisbeach  Castle,  where  very  queer  things 
happened.  Watson  died  at  Wisbeach  in 

1584.  There  was  now  but  one  bishop  left, 
the  by  no  means  heroic   Goldwell  of   St. 
Asaph's,  who  in  June,  1559,  proceeded  in 
disguise  to  the  sea-coast,  and  crossed  over 
to  the  Continent  without  being  recognised. 
He  continued  to  live  abroad  for  the  rest  of 
his  days,  which  ended  on  the  3rd  of  April, 

1585.  With    him   the   ancient   hierarchy 
ceased    to   exist.     That,    at   least,    is   the 
assertion  of   the  reverend  authors  of  the 
book   referred   to.     There   are  those  who 
maintain  the  contrary. 


SAINTE-BEUVE 

THE  vivacious,  the  in  fact  far  too  viva- 
cious, Abbe  Galiani,  writing  to  Madame 
d'Epinay,  observes  with  unwonted  serious- 
ness :  '  Je  remarque  que  le  caractere  dom- 
'  inant  des  Frangais  perce  toujours.  Us  sont 
'  causeurs,  raisonneurs,  badins  par  essence ; 
'un  mauvais  tableau  enfante  une  bonne 
'  brochure  ;  ainsi,  vous  parlerez  mieux  des 
'arts  que  vous  n'en  ferez  jamais.  II  se 
'trouvera,  au  bout  du  compte,  dans  quel- 
'ques  siecles,  que  vous  aurez  le  mieux 
'raisonne,  le  mieux  discut6  ce  que  toutes 
'  les  autres  nations  auront  fait  de  mieux.' 
To  affect  to  foretell  the  final  balance  of  an 
account  which  is  not  to  be  closed  for  cen- 
turies demands  either  celestial  assurance 
or  Neapolitan  impudence ;  but,  regarded  as 
a  guess,  the  Abbe's  was  a  shrewd  one.  The 
post-mortem  may  prove  him  wrong,  but  can 
hardly  prove  him  absurdly  wrong. 
298 


SAINTE-BE  UVE  299 

We  owe  much  to  the  French  —  enlight- 
enment, pleasure,  variety,  surprise ;  they 
have  helped  us  in  a  great  many  ways  : 
amongst  others,  to  play  an  occasional  game 
of  hide-and-seek  with  Puritanism,  a  dis- 
traction in  which  there  is  no  manner  of 
harm;  unless,  indeed,  the  demure  damsel 
were  to  turn  huffy,  and  after  we  had  hid- 
den ourselves,  refuse  to  find  us  again. 
Then,  indeed — to  use  a  colloquial  expres- 
sion —  there  would  be  the  devil  to  pay. 

But  nowhere  have  the  French  been  so 
helpful,  in  nothing  else  has  the  change 
from  the  native  to  the  foreign  article  been 
so  delightful,  as  in  this  very  matter  of  criti- 
cism upon  which  the  Abbe  Galiani  had 
seized  more  than  a  hundred  years  ago.  Mr. 
David  Stott  has  lately  published  two  small 
volumes  of  translations  from  the  writings  of 
Sainte-Beuve,  the  famous  critic,  who  so  long 
has  been  accepted  as  the  type  of  all  that 
is  excellent  in  French  criticism.  French 
turned  into  English  is  always  a  wof ul  spec- 
tacle —  the  pale,  smileless  corpse  of  what 
was  once  rare  and  radiant ;  but  it  is  a 
thousand  times  better  to  read  Sainte- 
Beuve  or  any  other  good  foreign  author 


300  SAINTE-BEUVE 

in  English  than  not  to  read  him  at  all. 
Everybody  has  not  time  to  emulate  the 
poet  Rowe,  who  learned  Spanish  in  order 
to  qualify  himself,  as  he  fondly  thought, 
for  a  snug  berth  at  Madrid,  only  to  be  told 
by  his  scholarly  patron  that  now  he  could 
read  Don  Quixote  in  the  original. 

We  hope  these  two  volumes  may  be 
widely  read,  as  they  deserve  to  be,  and  that 
they  may  set  their  readers  thinking  what 
it  is  that  makes  Sainte-Beuve  so  famous  a 
critic  and  so  delightful  a  writer.  His  vol- 
umes are  very  numerous.  'All  Balzac's 
'novels  occupy  a  shelf,'  says  Browning's 
Bishop ;  Sainte-Beuve's  criticisms  take  up 
quite  as  much  room.  The  Causeries  du 
Ltindi  and  the  Nouveaux  Lundis  fill  some 
twenty-eight  tomes.  A  priori,  one  would 
be  disposed  to  mutter,  '  This  is  too  much.' 
Can  any  man  turned  fifty  truthfully  declare 
that  he  wishes  De  Quincey  had  left  thirty 
volumes  behind  him  instead  of  fifteen  ? 
Great  is  De  Quincey,  but  so  elaborate  are 
his  movements,  so  tremendous  his  literary 
contortions,  that  when  you  have  done  with 
him  you  feel  it  would  be  cruelty  to  keep 
him  stretched  upon  the  rack  of  his  own 


SAINTE-BEUVE  30! 

style  for  a  moment  longer.  Sainte-Beuve 
is  as  easy  as  may  be.  Never  before  or 
since  has  there  been  an  author  so  well  con- 
tent with  his  subject,  whatever  it  might 
chance  to  be ;  so  willing  to  be  bound  within 
its  confines,  and  not  to  travel  beyond  it. 
In  this  excellent  '  stay-at-home '  quality,  he 
reminds  the  English  reader  more  of  Addi- 
son  than  of  any  of  our  later  critics  and  es- 
sayists. These  latter  are  too  anxious  to 
please,  far  too  disposed  to  believe  that, 
apart  from  themselves  and  their  flashing 
wits,  their  readers  can  have  no  possible  in- 
terest in  the  subject  they  have  in  hand. 
They  are  ever  seeking  to  adorn  their  theme 
instead  of  exploring  it.  They  are  always 
prancing,  seldom  willing  to  take  a  brisk 
constitutional  along  an  honest,  turnpike 
road.  Even  so  admirable,  so  sensible  a 
writer  as  Mr.  Lowell  is  apt  to  worry  us  with 
his  Elizabethan  profusion  of  imagery,  epi- 
thet, and  wit.  '  Something  too  much  of 
'this,'  we  cry  out  before  we  are  half-way 
through.  William  Hazlitt,  again,  is  really 
too  witty.  It  is  uncanny.  Sainte-Beuve 
never  teases  his  readers  this  way.  You 
often  catch  yourself  wondering,  so  matter- 


302  SAINTE-BEUVE 

of-fact  is  his  narrative,  why  it  is  you  are 
interested.  The  dates  of  the  births  and 
deaths  of  his  authors,  the  facts  as  to  their 
parentage  and  education,  are  placed  before 
you  with  stern  simplicity,  and  without  a 
single  one  of  those  quips  and  cranks  which 
Carlyle  ('  God  rest  his  soul !  —  he  was  a 
'merry  man ')  scattered  with  full  hands  over 
his  explosive  pages.  But  yet  if  you  are  in- 
terested, as  for  the  most  part  you  are,  what 
a  triumph  for  sobriety  and  good  sense ! 
A  noisy  author  is  as  bad  as  a  barrel-organ ; 
a  quiet  one  is  as  refreshing  as  a  long  pause 
in  a  foolish  sermon. 

Sainte-Beuve  covered  an  enormous  range 
in  his  criticism;  he  took  the  Whole  Lit- 
erature as  his  province.  It  is  an  amusing 
trait  of  many  living  authors  whose  odd  craze 
it  is  to  take  themselves  and  what  they  are 
fond  of  calling  their  '  work '  -  —  by  which,  if 
you  please,  they  mean  their  rhymes  and 
stories — very  seriously  indeed,  to  believe 
that  critics  exist  for  the  purpose  of  calling 
attention  to  them — these  living  solemnities 
—  and  pointing  out  their  varied  excellences, 
or  promise  of  excellence,  to  an  eager  book- 
buying  public.  To  detect  in  some  infant's 


SAINTE-BEUVE  303 

squall  the  rich  futurity  of  a  George  Eliot, 
to  predict  a  glorious  career  for  Gus  Hos- 
kins  —  this  it  is  to  be  a  true  critic.  For 
my  part,  I  think  a  critic  better  occupied, 
though  he  be  destitute  of  the  genius  of 
Lamb  or  Coleridge,  in  calling  attention  to 
the  real  greatnesses  or  shortcomings  of 
dead  authors  than  in  dictating  to  his  neigh- 
bours what  they  ought  to  think  about  living 
ones.  If  you  teach  me  or  help  me  to  think 
aright  about  Milton,  you  can  leave  me  to 
deal  with  The  Light  of  Asia  on  my  own  ac- 
count. Addison  was  better  employed  ex- 
pounding the  beauties  of  Paradise  Lost  to 
an  unappreciative  age  than  when  he  was 
puffing  Philips  and  belittling  Pope,  or  even 
than  he  would  have  been  had  he  puffed 
Pope  and  belittled  Philips. 

Sainte-Beuve  was  certainly  happier  snuf- 
fing the  'parfums  du  passee'  than  when 
ranging  amongst  the  celebrities  of  his 
own  day.  His  admiration  for  Victor 
Hugo,  which  so  notoriously  grew  cool,  is 
supposed  to  have  been  by  no  means 
remotely  connected  with  an  admiration  for 
Victor  Hugo's  wife.  These  things  cannot 


304  SAINTE-BEUVE 

be  helped,  but  if  you  confine  yourself  to 
the  past  they  cannot  happen. 

The  method  pursued  by  this  distin- 
guished critic  during  the  years  he  was 
producing  his  weekly  Canserie,  was  to 
shut  himself  up  alone  with  his  selected 
author  —  that  is,  with  his  author's  writings, 
letters,  and  cognate  works  —  for  five  days 
in  the  week.  This  was  his  period  of  im- 
mersion, of  saturation.  On  the  sixth  day 
he  wrote  his  criticism.  On  the  seventh 
he  did  no  manner  of  work.  The  fol- 
lowing day  the  Causerie  appeared,  and 
its  author  shut  himself  up  again  with  an- 
other set  of  books  to  produce  another  crit- 
icism. This  was  a  workmanlike  method. 
Sainte-Beuve  had  a  genuine  zeal  to  be  a 
good  workman  in  his  own  trade — the  true 
instinct  of  the  craftsman,  always  honoured 
in  France,  not  so  honoured  as  it  deserves 
to  be  in  England. 

Sainte-Beuve's  most  careless  reader  can- 
not fail  to  observe  his  contentment  with 
his  subject,  his  restraint,  and  his  good 
sense  —  all  workmanlike  qualities  :  but  a 
more  careful  study  of  his  writings  fully 
warrants  his  title  to  the  possession  of  other 


SAINTE-BEUVE  305 

qualities  it  would  be  rash  to  rank  higher, 
but  which,  here  in  England,  we  are  ac- 
customed to  reward  with  more  lavish 
praise  —  namely,  insight,  sympathy,  and 
feeling. 

To  begin  with,  he  was  endlessly  curious 
about  people,  without  being  in  the  least 
bit  a  gossip  or  a  tattler.  His  interest  never 
fails  him,  yet  never  leads  him  astray.  His 
skill  in  collecting  the  salient  facts  and  in 
emphasising  the  important  ones  is  marvel- 
lous. How  unerring  was  his  instinct  in 
these  matters  the  English  reader  is  best 
able  to  judge  by  his  handling  of  English 
authors,  so  diverse  and  so  difficult  as 
Cowper,  Gibbon,  and  Chesterfield.  He 
never  so  much  as  stumbles.  He  under- 
stands Olney  as  well  as  Lausanne,  Lady 
Austen  and  Mrs.  Unwin  as  well  as  Mad- 
ame Neckar  or  the  Hampshire  Militia. 
One  feels  sure  that  he  could  have  writ- 
ten a  better  paper  on  John  Bunyan  than 
Macaulay  did,  a  wiser  on  John  Wesley 
than  anybody  has  ever  done. 

Next  to  his  curiosity  must  be  ranked  his 
sympathy,  a  sympathy  all  the  more  conta- 
gious because  so  quietly  expressed,  and 


306  SAINTE-BE  U  VE 

never  purporting  to  be  based  on  intel- 
lectual accord.  He  handles  mankind  ten- 
derly though  firmly.  His  interest  in  them 
is  not  merely  scientific  —  his  methods  are 
scientific,  but  his  heart  is  human.  Read 
his  three  papers  on  Cowper  over  again,  and 
you  will  agree  with  me.  How  thoroughly 
he  appreciates  the  charm  of  Cowper's  happy 
hours  —  his  pleasant  humour  —  his  scholar- 
like  fancies  —  his  witty  verse  !  No  clumsy 
jesting  about  old  women  and  balls  of 
worsted.  It  is  the  mixture  of  insight 
with  sympathy  that  is  so  peculiarly  de- 
lightful. 

Sainte-Beuve's  feeling  is  displayed  doubt- 
less in  many  ways,  but  to  me  it  is  always 
most  apparent  when  he  is  upholding  mod- 
esty and  grace  and  wisdom  against  their 
loud-mouthed  opposites.  When  he  is  doing 
this,  his  words  seem  to  quiver  with  emotion 
—  the  critic  almost  becomes  the  preacher. 
I  gladly  take  an  example  from  one  of  the 
volumes  already  referred  to.  It  occurs  at 
the  close  of  a  paper  on  Camille  Desmou- 
lins,  of  whom  Sainte-Beuve  does  his  best 
to  speak  kindly,  but  the  reaction  comes  — 
powerful,  overwhelming,  sweeping  all  be- 
fore it : 


SAINTE-BEUVE  307 

'What  a  longing  we  feel  after  reading 
'these  pages,  encrusted  with  mire  and 
'blood — pages  which  are  the  living  image 
'  of  the  disorder  in  the  souls  and  morals  of 
'  those  times  !  What  a  need  we  experience 
'  of  taking  up  some  wise  book,  where  com- 
'  mon-sense  predominates,  and  in  which 
'the  good  language  is  but  the  reflection 
'of  a  delicate  and  honest  soul,  reared  in 
'  habits  of  honour  and  virtue !  We  ex- 
'  claim  :  Oh !  for  the  style  of  honest  men 
'  —  of  men  who  have  revered  everything 
'  worthy  of  respect ;  whose  innate  feelings 
'have  ever  been  governed  by  the  princi- 
'  pies  of  good  taste  !  Oh !  for  the  pol- 
'ished,  pure,  and  moderate  writers!  Oh  ! 
'for  Nicole's  Essays,  for  D'Aguesseau 
'  writing  the  Life  of  his  Father.  Oh  ! 
'  Vauvenargues  !  Oh  !  Pellisson  ! ' 

I  have  quoted  from  one  volume  ;  let  me 
now  quote  from  the  other.  I  will  take  a 
passage  from  the  paper  on  Madame  de 
Souza :  — 

'  In  stirring  times,  in  moments  of  inco- 
'  herent  and  confused  imagination  like  the 
'  present,  it  is  natural  to  make  for  the  most 
'  important  point,  to  busy  one's  self  with 


308  SAINTE-BEUVE 

'  the  general  working,  and  everywhere,  even 
'in  literature,  to  strike  boldly,  aim  high, 
'  and  shout  through  trumpets  and  speaking- 
'  tubes.  The  modest  graces  will  perhaps 
'  come  back  after  a  while,  and  come  with  an 
'  expression  appropriate  to  their  new  sur- 
'  roundings.  I  would  fain  believe  it ;  but 
*  while  hoping  for  the  best,  I  feel  sure  that 
'  it  will  not  be  to-morrow  that  their  senti- 
'  ments  and  their  speech  will  once  more 
'prevail.' 

But  I  must  conclude  with  a  sentence 
from  Sainte-Beuve's  own  pen.  Of  Joubert 
he  says :  '  II  a  une  maniere  qui  fait  qu'il  ne 
'  dit  rien,  absolument  rien  comme  un  autre. 
'  Cela  est  sensible  dans  les  lettres  qu'il  6crit, 
'  et  ne  laisse  pas  de  fatiguer  a  la  longue.' 
Of  such  a  judgment,  one  can  only  scribble 
in  the  margin,  '  How  true  ! '  Sainte-Beuve 
was  always  willing  to  write  like  another 
man.  Joubert  was  not.  And  yet,  strange 
paradox !  there  will  be  always  more  men 
able  to  write  in  the  strained  style  of  Jou- 
bert than  in  "the  natural  style  of  Sainte- 
Beuve.  It  is  easier  to  be  odd,  intense, 
over-wise,  enigmatic,  than  to  be  sensible, 
simple,  and  to  see  the  plain  truth  about 
things. 


A    000  686  300     5 


